Misguided Apple Intelligence Ads

I transcribe very old deeds by reading them aloud into BBEdit (or any text gathering app) and am constantly having to find and replace misspellings of words like “heirs” and “thence” which comes out as “fence” or “since.” It would be great for an ad to show someone doing this kind of task, and when the app mistypes one of these words, the ad shows the speaker pause, highlight the word, correct it and then have the AI remember the correction the next time it comes up.

I’ll go with Apple Intelligence being used by Apple designers and developers ^[1] to help them Think Different™ and to ship hardware and software that Just Works™.
;-)

Seriously, now, I don’t know if the current ad campaign is a symptom of tone deafness at Apple or simply a marketing decision to target user segments that respond to consumer-packaged-goods style ads. The “bumbling parent” and “surprised authority figure” themes are extremely common in ads for products such as paper towels, laundry detergent, and processed foods.

I’d also say the current wave of ads does not have the same focus or themes as the earlier ads that attacked a key Apple customer segment. I agree it was extraordinarily arrogant of Apple to seemingly approve of the destruction of graphic creatives’ jobs.

1. Ad Proposal: open on an Apple Product Designer staring at a design for a mouse on a screen. The Designer draws a charging port on the bottom of the mouse. They then click an “Apple Intelligence Magic Wand” button and we see Apple Intelligence move the port to the top edge of the mouse. ↩︎

I was reading an interesting astronomy article at BBC. At the foot of the page was a short list of “related” articles. It was evident that they were created by (questionable) AI e.g. “Manchester mayor opens partnership hub”! I thought some lazy editor has not checked the actual relevance of the links.

Then I switched to Tidbits and read Adam’s article that indicates Apple is targeting the lazy in its AI ads.

Same. THAT would be very helpful. Like adding a frequently used acronym to your dictionary.

Diane

While the moving and serious kinds of ideas suggested here would be great, I have zero problem with the current funny ads for Apple Intelligence. I doubt someone is taking them seriously like, “I’m a lazy slob, too! I can use Apple Intelligence to make up for when I forget a birthday or prepare for work!”

BTW, there are two more ads you missed, “Catch up quick” and “Change your tone”.

Steve Jobs must be turning in his grave over these two pathetic ads. I can’t believe the same company that created:

“1984”

“I’m a Mac/I’m a PC,”

“Here’s To The Crazy Ones”

“ iPod Dancers,”

‘Mac vs Ordinary, Dorky, pathetic, super slow PC,”

“The Future Of Television”

“The little kid who tells his dad he “wants to see dinosaurs on TV.”

“More personal Siri,”

Etc, etc, etc, etc. Just to name a very, very, very, few.

I agree. Those 2 ads Adam mentioned are downright awful. I wistfully long for the days past where I was (at one time) trying to collect all ads Apple. I actually had DVDs full.of them.

And the music they are using for these AI ads is awful as well.

Happy to see this. Those new Apple Intelligence ads turned me off right away. All 5 of them. That’s not how we should be using or advertising AI/ML.

The key use case Apple itself boasts about essentially comes down to deception intended for lazy people and egoistical posers who have zero work ethic and care little about their family members and friends. Who wants that kind of behavior enforced?
What’s missing here is emphasis on how these tools can be used to support good behavior and suppress bad impulses.

The earlier ads were created by ad agencies like Chiat/Day. I believe then Apple brought ad creation inside the company. That’s a bad move; companies like Apple develop a distorted view of the world. If you want to market to the real world, you should employ people who live in it for that purpose.

I think it’s time for a fresh tier of management in there, a lot of ‘emeritus’ roles of late. Folks who don’t have to monitor anymore staying on and new blood not being empowered to kick into new directions for marketing.

The ads are as lazy, unmindful and unpleasant as the characters they ‘empower’.

I think that like it or not, the situations portrayed in the adverts are realistic and common uses of generative AI. Given that Apple is playing catch-up in the generative AI space and that Apple is primarily a lifestyle, not tech hobbyist or B2B, brand now, the ad campaign makes strategic sense.

Having said that, I agree with @LarryR that Apple marketing under Cook—an operations guy—is much less exciting and innovative than in the past. Then again, Apple is a much different company from just about every perspective than it was in the 1980s-2000s. Anybody looking for the old excitement and wonder will probably find it more interesting to follow startups, in my opinion.

Maybe Apple Intelligence is writing the ads for Apple Intelligence?

For very many decades after 1984, Apple continues to work with what became known as TBWA/Chiat Day’s Media Arts Lab. It’s a freestanding ad agency within an ad agency, and Apple is, and has been, its only client:

https://www.mediaartslab.com/

And for many years Apple has also been building ads in-house:

Let’s consider the writing itself:

Hey J,

Been thinking, this project might need a bit of zhuhzing. But you’re the big enchilada.

Holler back,
Warren

(I can’t get the gray flexed arms.)

And the after message:

Hey J,

Upon further consideration, I believe this project may require some refinement. However, you are the most capable individual to undertake this task.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Best regards,
Warren

Is this revised e-mail an example of smart writing? I don’t think so. The language here is stilted in the extreme: upon further consideration, may require, the introductory however, individual, undertake. And it’s all addressed to a boss, suggesting that the boss do the work. The smarter response to a boss might be to say “On it” — or to explain that you’re swamped and wonder whether someone else (who’s not the boss) might take on the task.

But wait: Warren’s e-mail bears the (dumb) subject line “Project Stuff” (unchanged in the revision). There’s no “Re:” — it doesn’t appear that Warren is replying to a request that he take on a new task, though he might be replying to a spoken request to do so. But look again at the original e-mail: Warren was suggesting that there might be a need for further work on a project, but that the decision rests with the boss. Warren was having second thoughts. Apple Intelligence appears to have misunderstood his words.

What might real human intelligence look like here? Maybe something like this:

Hi J,

I think that this project still needs improvement, and I’d be happy to meet and talk about it with you. But I know that’s your decision to make. Let me know what you think,

Warren

The scary question: is this revised e-mail an example of what Apple thinks good writing looks like, or is it an example of what someone at Apple thinks its customers think good writing looks like? I’m not sure which answer is scarier.

Retired English prof here — I had to do a close reading. :)

I’d say that given literacy levels in the US are decreasing (for many reasons, including the types of reading and writing students do now) both answers are correct. Plus the “fixed” text actually is typical of generative AI output.

Plus the “fixed” text actually is typical of generative AI output.

Yes, for sure. I once asked ChatGPT to write an e-mail to a professor about missing a class, just to see what would happen. It began “I hope this email finds you well” and went on for five paragraphs.

Sort of related: I’ve been hearing from colleagues in the AI space that there are real concerns about the ability of younger people to engage with AI…because they lack the skills needed to organize their thoughts and to write effective prompts.

It turns out that the people most adept with AI may not be hip, “raised on tech” twenty-somethings, but rather seasoned professionals and, dare I say it, retired English profs.

Ha! A related ancedote: I attended a webinar about real-world applications of generative AI a few months ago where a professor discussed how he uses gAI to generate reference letters for students. He has a lot of content posted online so he tells a student who wants a reference to send him bullet points. He then prompts a gAI to “write a recommendation that mentions “x”, “y”, and “z” in the voice of Professor XXX.”

Wow, the Catch Up Quick ad is equally as bad. At least the Change Your Tone ad, if exaggerated for effect, shows the guy using Apple Intelligence to restrain his baser impulses and be a better person.

I agree with the consensus here about these ads - I’ve been complaining about them since the Bella Ramsey ads started in September.

That said: the demographic at tidbits forums is generally very technically proficient and, let’s face it, most of us are older than average. It’s very possible that these ads play very well with a younger and less technical demographic. As I recall Apple is very careful about their public image and I imagine tests their ads with focus groups pretty regularly. So perhaps Apple is getting the message across that they want to the people they want to see it.

The real question IMHO is: what other message are they getting across?

That it’s OK to be a self-absorbed poser? Or that it’s OK to be a slacker and try to cheat your way through life? Is that really what we strive to see such tools used for?

As @ace indicated, it seems their tone deafness that was put on such public display with the iPad crush ad, has not yet been satisfactorily addressed.

Buy an iPhone instead of an Android phone - or upgrade your old iPhone if it can’t do this fancy Apple Intelligence.

I stumbled on the r/CommercialsIHate subreddit, and while everyone there hates everything by definition, the Apple Intelligence ads are getting a lot of the same comments as we’re making. I’m guessing Reddit trends younger.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CommercialsIHate/search/?q=Apple+Intelligence

In each, the protagonist catches our eye and holds the look, a shared understanding implied, an ‘I got this’ from an isolated individual in the midst of a collective activity, which somehow deserves their contempt. I can’t stand these ads. The pudding one is the least offensive, but the family one really bothers me.

The music in the current Apple ads is downright diabolical. I have to press mute when they come on.

Yes! That’s what it is. Apple Intelligence is letting these people put one over on the rubes who are hard at work, who remembered their spouse’s birthday, who prepared for the meeting.

Except THAT sends the message that no oldsters need apply to own Apple products. As someone who has been an Apple loyalist since 1984 AND is a former Apple employee, I’m insulted.

It’s likely only a problem if these ads will prevent you (or, better, a significant number of people in this demographic) from ever buying an iPhone again. I don’t like almost all of these ads, though the one where the guy drafts an incendiary email when his food is stolen at work and uses AI to make it friendlier I think is just fine, and probably how I might use this going forward. But these ads will have absolutely zero effect on whether I buy an iPhone going forward.

Apple needs to show serious people doing serious work with AI, and I’ll admit that is likely a difficult task in a 30-60 second spot. Given that I have thousands of files related to my county’s history and genealogy, it would be great if I could tell AI to locate and list chronologically all of them that contain a particular name or place, but how easy would it be for Apple to create an ad showing something like that which would be eye-catching as well?

I didn’t care for the food-is-stolen ad. But as a senior citizen who has learned (the hard way) to reflect-rewrite-then send, I’m not part of the target market.

The main problem isn’t whether it dissuades people already inclined to buy Apple products from doing so. Apple isn’t targeting these ads at them. The problem comes from those who are on the fence seeing these ads and being turned off from the Apple products for .

There’s already a huge contingent of Android and Windows fanatics who are happy to tell anyone who will listen that Apple’s products “aren’t for serious users”, and these ads don’t help that image at all.

who remembered their spouse’s birthday

She didn’t forget her spouse’s birthday. The guy says, “I thought we agreed ‘no gifts’” when the daughters walked in with them, so the woman felt put on the spot.

I couldn’t agree more with you, Adam. LLMs work best when you DO put in effort. Let me give an example:

My own most recent use of ChatGPT was to “write a T-shirt.” We’re giving T-shirts to everyone who attends our Tree-Trimming Party this year, and I needed inspiration for what the shirt’s message should be. Ideally, we wanted something in the spirit of Christmas that people of any religion (or none) could wear all year round. I’m a professional writer and was coming up blank, so I turned to ChatGPT just to get me started. After five tries, I got a winner:

Choose Joy,
Share Smiles,
Spread Love

All I had to do was break the lines, capitalize each word, then design the typography. We chose a rainbow-colored font, and the finished product looks great. It’s appropriate for everyone at anytime of year. Our us of an LLM wasn’t exactly easy , but it did enable us to think outside the box.

That’s not how most people seem to be interpreting her facial expressions, but under that interpretation, it’s equally as troubling that she feels sufficiently threatened by her daughters’ efforts that she has to compete with them. In that case, the reasonable adult thing would be to walk over to the couch and praise the daughters for being so thoughtful.

Apple is continuing to do some good ads for products beyond Macs and Intelligence. Here’s just one example:

https://www.ispot.tv/brands/Z64/apple-watch

I watched those two other ads. I thought there was humour in them but I still miss the “I’m a Mac; I’m a PeeCee” level of humour.

Here’s the latest Apple ad, but this time for Apple Pay. Apple is trying to be funny, but in doing so appears to be selling us on a obsessive and sedentary lifestyle while promoting impulse purchasing.

Shame, really. Apple Pay is a great service. It would deserve being advertised in its ability to make our lives better and showcasing how it supports good and healthy behavior, not this garbage.

They were better (and funnier) at this a year ago when they did these

Adam, what Apple needs is a return to the brilliance of Chiat\Day. Their current ad agency seems completely out of touch when it comes to communicating the benefits of AI. The ads they’ve produced are some of the most patronizing I’ve ever seen. If my generation were portrayed as a bunch of incompetent, drunken monkeys, I’d be offended. If I were still in management, I wouldn’t hesitate to fire anyone who relied on AI as a mere crutch instead of using it to enhance their capabilities.

At 81, I’m still waiting to hear about how AI is supposed to help our World, economy or life/etc. I simply do not understand why I should want to use “Artificial” intelligence. Hopefully, AI will be at least half as helpful as spel-cheque can bee?

Don’t forget, advertisers are the clients of ad agencies. An ad agency cannot do anything without the participation and approval of the advertiser. So while Apple’s current advertisements do not resonate with some people as they did historically—and let’s also recognize that humans’ selective memories have filtered out a lot of “bad” ads that ran in the past from our recollections—only part of the responsibility lies with the ad agency.

Well, let’s ask a generative AI!

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/im-still-waiting-to-hear-about-qmf6f7wnQrO70Gc9p3hcDA

Great example.

Check out the sources. It’s a mishmash of European parliament staffers trying to produce more paper, PWC, and McKinsey. Anybody who would take those 3 as serious sources for such a question deserves every bit of what’s about to come.

Yes, this type of analysis is best left to YouTube influencers and crypto-bros!

Let’s stay focused on the ads, please.

Those are great. They identify a real-world problem that we can all identify with and show Apple Pay solving it instantly. Simple, effective, and funny.

With Apple Intelligence, I could also imagine someone putting together a slideshow for a retirement party or graduation or the like, and finding photo after photo that has something completely ludicrous sticking out of the person’s head, then fixing them all with Clean Up.

This horrendous campaign was just one enormously big glitch. It was not anything even remotely resembling a continuing saga.

Remember how Jony Ive pushed a reluctant Steve Jobs into making a line of super duper Apple Watches that have a bunch of super super super duper expensive and very, very, very high fashion targeted models and accessories costing into the many, many thousands of dollars? The ad campaign for it ran for a very, very, very very few years and turned out to be very, very, very super extremely unprofitable. Tim Cook was the one who wanted to focus on watches and watch bands to be very health, fitness and communications focused. Steve stayed with Tim, and sent Jony went running out into the hills.

Except for this current ad campaign, which is not a large one, I think Tim has and is doing an excellent job. And the revenue he has been generating for decades proves it.

Personally, I don’t view the Apple Intelligence ads as good or bad. Apple is a huge, multinational company with a broad and diverse customer base that buys a wide range of products and services. It no longer is a company offering a couple of personal computers to a mostly homogenous set of people. As such, a particular series of ads cannot—and doesn’t need to—appeal to every single Apple customer.

I’d say the ads are targeted to audiences that (clearly!) are very different from the TidBITS Talk user base. And if I was somebody charged with identifying market segments with a high growth potential or a high future revenue potential, I’m not sure TidBITS users would be my first priority (no offense, I’m talking about demographics and spending habits here, not personality traits).

As for how the Apple Watch product assortment and marketing has evolved, I’d say it reflects how Apple’s corporate focus in recent years has shifted from a mass luxury, physical objects-driven position that was personified by Ive and Ahrendts to a utilitarian, services-driven position that is personified by Cook and Cue. In any case, I believe Ive’s push to position Apple Watch as a high fashion item at the beginning was effective because the Watch received a great deal of non-tech media coverage that allowed the Watch to be seen as something other than a FitBit competitor.

Apple is a multinational corporation with a market capitalization of $3,446,709,960,460. As usual, they continue to have the highest market cap in the entire world. If they want to keep it this way Apple will have to continue to build, develop and promote products and services that will keep devoted fans happy as well as attract new and existing buyers.

To do so, they will have keep their current and new hardware, services, and product development way ahead of the very competitive market. And they need to continue to keep and attracting new buyers and keeping current purchasers happy. That’s where advertising and PR come in. It’s what’s keeping Apple alive and happy.

Just a quick note about market cap. Market cap is simply share price x number of shares outstanding. So AAPL has many ways to influence its market cap beyond organic growth, such as adjusting its cash holdings, issuing or buying back shares, spinning off businesses, moving revenues to low tax countries, and issuing or retiring debt. External factors also affect market caps, including interest rate expectations, economic forecasts, and geopolitical events.

I’d call it apple stupidity. Just upgraded from 17.x to 18.1 on my iPad. Yesterday I asked Siri (something I frequently do) what the temperature was. I get a “can’t tell you because I have no clue about your location (words to that effect).” Today I asked for my location and she knew exactly where it was. BUT could NOT tell me the temp because she had no clue about my location.

This seems to me to be all about marketing and nothing about failed technology (admittedly this is only one tiny example, but enough to sour me on what they are doing).

OK, let’s stay on the topic of ads, not Apple’s corporate finances.

Just to reiterate, Apple Intelligence has made only minor updates to Siri. See my post in another thread: Apple Intelligence is wicked stupid! - #6 by ddmiller

Full AI to Siri is coming with to later versions of iOS 18, I’ve heard through the releases into next spring (though there is no official calendar that I know of.) For now we are essentially still using the same Siri we’ve been complaining about more and more for years. I believe it’s confirmed that 18,2 will bring optional ChatGPT integration to Siri requests.

The “daytime TV” flavor of the ads we’ve been discussing in this thread combined with the observations in this Bloomberg story may point to an effort at Apple to target women as part of its Apple Intelligence marketing campaign:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-29/why-are-women-less-likely-to-use-ai?srnd=homepage-americas