Apple’s New Ads Are Excruciatingly Patronising, But They Aren’t For You

We’ve seen some great ads come out of Apple in the last few years, but the company’s newest set of ads playing up Apple’s Geniuses are almost painful to watch. I’ve done some thinking and I’ve figured out that they’re ok, simply because these ads aren’t for us.

If you’ve got this far into an article about Apple’s advertising then it’s a fair bet you consider yourself tech savvy. That’s a good thing, because when I talk about you, me and us, I’m insinuating that you’re on top of tech.

Apple’s had some crackingly good ads in the last five years. Most notably the comically dry Mac versus PC ads starring Justin Long and John Hodgman and the iPod silhouette ads that showed Apple getting its funk on.

These latest ads though feature Apple Geniuses helping people out with things like iMovie, iPhoto and show the difference between genuine and non-genuine Apple products.

In the first ad, our hipster-looking Genius puts his hand up on a plane to help someone make a short in iMovie before the plane lands. The user is presented as a real numpty with technology and the Genius swoops in to advocate drag and drop of files and shows us just how easy it is to make things.

In the second ad, the same hipster Genius is stopped in the lunch line on the street and told by a man that he just bought a laptop from a slimy computer salesman who told him it was “just like a Mac”. The Genius showed him the error of his ways.

The third ad (which is by far the most obnoxious) shows our Genius being woken in the middle of the night by a brand new father whose wife is in the process of giving birth. Rather than tend to his wife who is likely in agony upstairs, he wants the Genius to help him make a photo card to announce the birth. “Hilarity” ensues.

These ads are really patronising. There’s none of the subtle humour we saw in the Mac versus PC ads, nor is there any funky fresh graphics or music like we see in the iPod ads. They aren’t even quirky or funny like the new Siri ads are. So who are these ads even for?

There’s been a long-held belief in the professional community that kept Apple is moving away from making and selling products for them and instead is now pitching to the cashed up consumer segment that replace their devices every two years and line up around the block for every new release. This new campaign confirms that, on an advertising level, Apple has cast the professional market aside.

Vale, the Apple we once knew.

Do you have a favourite Apple ad?


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