First there was the 1-minute wordless Apple FaceTime spot set to Louis Armstrong music featuring the intimate moments in family life which can now be shared over distances thanks to this new iOS4 technology. Fortune online is calling Apple's new commercials for FaceTime "heartbreaking." Spolier warning: nobody gets any bad news. As a matter of fact, in two out of the four spots, the characters in fact receive good news. In the other two, things are bittersweet at worst and basically all the ads have happy endings. We think the emotional term the business-minded folks over at fortune were looking for was "heart-warming." Hey, it's July -- it must have been the heat (wave) going to their heads. Perhaps, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, no matter how good is his depth of knowledge of Apple, is thinking of this heartbreaking iPhone 4 FaceTime ad. In any event, the misnomer is evidence of how little premium our society puts on emotional literacy. Or phrased less pretentiously: being able to name what we're feeling. Put more vividly: heartwarming = "I'm expecting a baby," heartbreaking = "I lost the baby." As the messenger usually gets hung, perhaps best to leave miscarriages out of marketing. That said, who knows what kind of deep buy-in would-be customers might have were they to see how even troubling news is a part of life's rich fabric and lo, without our hero product they might not have been there to support a loved one in need.
Overall and in sum, the creative approach and execution of these ads is bang-on: intimate, human but never quotidian. While quiet and without music to skew the emotions, the pieces are even a bit awkward. Such is life itself.
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