Michael Wolff: Apple ad campaign is about ... feelings

Columnist Michael Wolff. (Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY)

Apple has a precise market problem: Its gargantuan profit margins on the iPhone have naturally eroded with new competition. What's more, its primary competitor, Samsung, is spending bazillions to hasten that erosion.

Now, in a ruling last week by a federal judge concluding that Apple conspired with book publishers to fix e-book prices, it has Justice Department problems that could result in big fines and close regulation.

But it may have even more epochal and existential issues, nowhere more evident than in its latest advertising campaign, called "Our signature."

Apple is the ne plus ultra marketing company of our time.

For almost 20 years, it struggled with the nature of its product and the quality of its message. Perhaps no other American company has ever kept at it for so long. Parallel to the company's efforts, its founder, Steve Jobs, was going through a similar struggle with the nature of his own character and perfection of his talents.

They clicked together, arriving at an American marketing moment up there with Dante, Shakespeare, Leonardo and Mozart (why quibble?).

Now ... "Our signature." The world's most recognizable company seems to need to tell people it should be recognized.

Apple has often announced itself through its advertising campaigns. The power of advertising, waning across much of the consumer world, has been demonstrated again and again by Apple: A computer for the rest of us; 1984; Think Different.

The ads not only showed the world how Apple wanted to be seen, they showed the people at Apple what the company should be.

The new ad tries very hard to be an Apple ad in that tradition. It's very ... artistic ... sensitive. It is all about ... feelings. It is, in fact, very precise in telling the consumer what he or she ought to feel about Apple - that is, we are telling you to feel very warm and fuzzy. So don't you?

Apple's ads, like most everything else in the company, used to be obsessively overseen by Jobs himself. His frequent collaborator Jay Chiat, of the advertising agency Chiat/Day, was another prima donna and one-man band. Chiat, in fact, was always complaining about his friend Jobs, as I suspect Jobs was complaining about him. Two difficult guys.

As it happens, Chiat's agency would go from unique to unexceptional with his departure from the firm (he died of prostate cancer in 2002) - as Apple may be drifting now.

This new ad is also from the same agency, but created without Jobs.

The ad has the worried tone of people who have begun to doubt themselves, of people finding themselves between image and reality.

All of Apple, one begins to sense, is becoming bit by bit ever more disconnected from ... they can no longer say what, the ads suggest.

It's about design, the ads claim. That's the pitch: You should want Apple products because they have good design, the ads say, somehow forgetting that good design can only speak for itself.

When Jobs began to get unmistakably sicker, Apple loyalists took offended umbrage at the notion that the company depended on one person. To say this was not only offensive to Apple, but to a dying man.

Wall Street, the media and the tech community agreed to be polite and not press the point about Apple losing its heart, soul and head.

There was also a structural belief that any company that attains most-valuable-in-the-world status is necessarily so much a part of the fabric of its customers' lives, not to mention the era itself, that it must transcend one man.

And yet ...

One Apple virtue is its limited and precise suite of products, as opposed to, say, Sony's. But the downside of this is how dependent that strategy is on tone. A little doubt or uncertainty can wreak havoc with the entire line and its reason for being.

You descend into self-parody.

Tim Nudd, Adweek's brilliant decoder of ad semiotics, points out that the Signature campaign is the first Apple ad to use the word "product."

The company is looking at itself from outside in.

It's telling its customers what to feel, because it no longer quite knows how to convey the emotions it once sold.

As Jobs recedes, the idea recedes, too.

"This is what matters," says the ad. "The experience of a product. How will it make someone feel? Will it make life better? Does it deserve to exist? We spend a lot of time on a few great things until every idea we touch enhances each life it touches. You may rarely look at it, but you'll always feel it. This is our signature. And it means everything."

It means nothing.

It means Apple's historic moment of marketing genius - an exceptional unity of product and message - is quickly being lost, and with it, the point of the company.