Episode 154 - Apple 2030 Status | Mother Nature Ad Reviewed
Apple’s “2030 Status | Mother Nature” video wraps up an ad and a sustainability report in one, addressing climate action cynicism and opening the company up to scrutiny in a new and engaging way. On this week’s episode, we ask who this ad is targeting and evaluate how good this storytelling approach is for Apple’s marketing.
Watch our guests Scott Morrison FRSA (Founder of The Boom!) and Emma Roffey (Former VP Marketing EMEAR at Cisco) debate this brand activation and find out why they scored it 4.5/5.
PS. We’ve had to cut the ad to fit the show but you can see it in its entirety here.
Concerned about hitting those Q4 marketing goals?
Most marketers are feeling an increase in pressure to deliver marketing efficiency by the end of the year. Your budgets for 2024 depend on it, and so does this and next year’s success. At Automated Creative, we’ve got solutions to help you take control of your end-of-year campaigns.
Developed together with the World Federation of Advertisers and our clients at Brown-Forman and Mars, our white paper “Compounding Creative: An Urgent Q4 Wake-up Call” sets out the biggest mistakes marketers might be making with their Q4 campaigns and shows you actionable steps you can take today to boost results by the end of the year.
Read it here and get in touch to see how we can help increase creative effectiveness.
Episode 154 - Apple 2030 Status | Mother Nature Ad Reviewed
Transcript is automatically generated, so not perfect, but you get the idea!
Tom Ollerton 0:00
Hello and welcome to Advertisers Watching Ads. This is a weekly show where brands watch other brands' ads.
My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform. But this week is about an Apple ad and it is very long and we've got two sort of ex-Advertisers Watching Ads (guests) this week. Can you guys introduce yourselves?
Scott Morrison 0:49
Hi, I'm Scott Morrison. I run a company called The Boom! Formerly an ad person, then ran big brands across the world. Now, work with big brands across the world, helping them create impact by unblock, unlock, unleash.
Emma Roffey 1:01
And I'm Emma Roffey. Having recently left the corporate world of Cisco for the past 20 years, deciding on what to do, but currently working on an enterprise SaaS startup which is very exciting.
Tom Ollerton 1:13
Fantastic. Right... We can't show you the whole ad today. It's so flipping long, but I'm going to do a cool little edit of all the good bits so you can go check out the full link another time.
It needs a score of five. One, two, three... Vote with your fingers. Five and a four. Right. Scott, I'm dying to know what you think of this ad...
Scott Morrison 4:18
Well, listen, I've started to work on this phenomenon called "The Very Hungry Audience" and it's something bold in the fact that smartphones have powered up our expectations and they've got to such heights that we now sort of hunger and gorge on seamlessness of information, I think is relative to brands and services, in this kind of vain hope that the more of it we have, the more beautiful the butterfly will become. And I think Apple know this, right? They know... I think they make products seamless. And I think in this video, what they're doing is they're serving up this platter of information that is there to sate that hungry audience. From my perspective, what Apple has done here is open themselves up to scrutiny and environmental credentials. And actually, if you look at CDP, CDP, this kind of business that look at how people give environmental disclosure. Only 1.3% of the businesses and £11 trillion worth of business or dollars actually do that and I tell you what, you find another tech company that's as open as them and I'll eat my hat literally.
Emma Roffey 5:11
I loved it. Absolutely loved it. The story is so complex. And there's so much cynicism out there about it. And I love the fact that they addressed all of the points with humor. They hit it really hard, nail on the head, and with some concrete facts, and concrete data. But what I loved about it most is the cynicism and it's addressing that cynicism head-on, which is, which is brave to do. It allows them to make very strong concrete points that are very exciting. And yes, the competition should learn from that as well. Everybody should. The commitments that they're making in the time frame they're making. And then at the end, I love it at the end to the future product, as well. It's so it's, it's fantastic storytelling. Yeah.
Tom Ollerton 6:02
Who's this trying to convince?
Scott Morrison 6:05
I actually think that who they're talking to there is the competition. You know, it's kind of ongoing thing with Apple. You know, they've always had Apple versus PC. I think it's a really... a nuance of that campaign because actually, you think about it, it's a beautiful piece of storytelling. It's shot in, Apple now are a content provider as well as anything else, they're not just a machine maker. And then you kind of position that against some of their other competition. And it feels very, very different. No one else is saying, "These are our credentials. This is what we're doing here. This is what we're openly talking about." Okay, they might be doing it, but I don't know if they're talking about it in lay people's terms like Apple are and doing it in the brand way that reinforces all the brand values that Apple always brings to the table.
Emma Roffey 6:42
They are doing it at the brand level but what I'm particularly impressed at is at that higher level, but it covers so much of the story, you know, from the big things, their products, the footprint, the first stage, all of it. And that's what's smart about it. Okay... It's a long ad. It's 10 minutes. You can say, "Well, they can do that." But it's very good storytelling.
Scott Morrison 7:03
It's not an ad. It's an environment or sustainability report because the typical medium for this is from the shareholders report that thick, going, "Will everybody read this?" It comes with the question and the understanding in the knowledge that probably only the hardcore people are really going to go through to a certain degree and all of those questions will have already been pre-answered. But a lot of it's kind of in a very boring, overwritten, overthought through, over sanctimonious document. This is the equivalent of that. And that's why I think it's powerful because what they're doing is saying, "Here's what you normally get. We're condensing it, we're putting it out, and we're being, we're putting it at the heart of one of our biggest launches of the year because it's important to us to put this out to our consumers and our competitors.
Emma Roffey 7:45
I haven't seen and I don't know if they have, but I think it lends itself to fantastic sound bites as well. If they do break it down into smaller chunks. And I think that's what's clever about it, too. I haven't seen if they've done that, but I can see it leans that way and they can absolutely build on this. I'm sure they have, I'm sure they have.
Scott Morrison 8:04
There was lots of things that weren't covered in there. You can always say, "Well, where do you stop? You know, where do you stop?" You know, because the next you know, you could go down every avenue and turn. What is one specific message about... Let's say for argument's sake, sustainability and not supply chain or not product-making. Keep the message very focused. They do say there's still more work to be done. And I'm sure that they will find the other areas of work that needs to be done. There's plenty of things that they wouldn't have put in that video because it wouldn't be palatable. They've got to work on that, too. That doesn't excuse it in this video, but I think that's another conversation that they need to have and people need to prod. And I think it's good that it gets prodded because once you stick your head over the parapet and do a video like this, it opens up more of a debate on other areas that you need to work at.
Emma Roffey 8:52
Yeah, and I like the tone of it. They are saying, "Oh, for me, there's work to be done." But what they have committed to, what they are addressing they're addressing in a very strong way. Very factual, very clear deadlines. But yes, there's more work to be done. As with anything. But I think it's setting the path, as I say, for others, is setting a fantastic example. There are many other companies doing stuff, but Apple have taken that brave step to, I think to show as much as they can in that space of time. And hit some of it head on. So I admire them for that.
Tom Ollerton 9:32
Would you sign off this activation in its current form, yes or no? Yep. Scott, Emma, thank you so much for your time. We'll see you all next week.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Listen to our ‘Shiny New Object’ Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and Soundcloud.