That Apple sells privacy as a significant product is already well-known.
The company started positioning privacy as a distinct advantage in 2019 and has made a series of ads through their agency, TBWA\Media Arts Lab.
I have written about 2 such ads earlier too, though not specifically about the ads, per se, and more about the issues I had with the narrative.
Apple released a brand new ad in that series (called, ‘Privacy. That’s iPhone’) recently.
I noticed 5 ads from 2019 to 2022 (including the latest) and observed an evolution in the narrative and the perspective that Apple seems to be moving towards.
Let me start with the ad from March 2019. It was called ‘Privacy Matters’ and creatively portrayed many situations and actions that we indulge in to keep our offline matters private, away from prying eyes.
The actions shown across the ad are relatable, everyday occurrences – a predominance of locks and signboards, people stopping to talk when someone else comes close to them and then resuming the talk, and even a guy moving away from another at a urinal 🙂
The line goes, ‘If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on’. The framing here is through how we view and know of privacy offline, in the real world, and mapping it to our phone given how much of our life is on the phone these days. There is nothing about phone-centric, or internet-centric privacy at all.
Then, here is the October 2019 follow-up, called ‘Simple as that’.
This ad is almost like a direct sequel to the earlier one given how it starts with, ‘Right now, there is more private information on this phone, than in your home! This makes privacy more important than ever’.
Then the voice-over starts listing select private data that we are used to seeing on the phone as examples: your location, your messages, your heart rate after a run.
The ad concludes with, ‘These are private things. Personal things. And they should belong… to you. Simple as that’.
With this ad, Apple was warming up to phone-centric privacy.
With both these ads, Apple was focused directly on the users, educating the basics of privacy even as they don’t do anything but simply use the phone.
Then comes the September 2020 ad, called ‘Over sharing’.
This is where things get whimsical!
I had detailed my counterpoints against the ad in detail in an earlier post.
Crux: We do not share our private phone-centric details with individuals we meet. Ad exchanges and companies buy that information to monetize our data.
But, from a narrative perspective, dramatization works wonders. The ad is considerably more interesting, funny, and enjoyable! And ends up making the point about what happens to our data with a punch, even though, technically, it’s inaccurate and absurd.
And all this while, Apple is only talking about what we, the users, end up doing because we don’t care about privacy as much as Apple wants us to.
Next up: the May 2021 ad, titled ‘Tracked’.
This ad ups the ante, and moves from dramatization to personification… it actually personifies the way other organizations use our data by getting them to be literal individuals who follow us wherever we go. In terms of entertainment potential, this one goes for the jugular against ad networks and companies like Facebook that track individuals.
Observe how the movement has been slow and steady – from merely talking about the offline meaning of privacy to educating us about online privacy to name-dropping some specific data sets that we should care for when it comes to privacy, to show how we end up sharing our details to the world without being careful enough… to showing how those data-hungry parties are always with us.
So, the latest Apple privacy ad is worth watching after noticing the evolution in the narratives.
Going one up on the last year’s ad, the new ad takes a sledgehammer and knocks on the doors of the digital data brokers!
Much like the 2021 ad, there is a personification of the digital data auction – brands bid on keywords and other criteria, based on your actions in your phone, so that they show relevant ads to you. Apple makes this bid process personal by isolating the data of one girl and through this narrative, makes it seem incredibly creepy like the earlier ad which had strangers following the individual.
Notice how the first three ads were about the individual while the last two flip the perspective to move away from individual actions and focus on how the data is being used by nefarious digital players. In these two ads, the individuals aren’t doing anything – the goal is to show the other side, how the data is being appropriated.
Going by this trend, I can’t wait to see what the next narrative is going to be 🙂