Apple Pulls “Convince Your Parents to Get You a Mac” Ad
Apple today shared The Parent Presentation, which explains why a Mac is a useful tool in college. The customizable 81-slide presentation is available in PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides formats. After downloading the template on this page, you can fill in your name and some other key details, and make other edits to your liking.
The presentation mostly contains tongue-in-cheek comments, but it also outlines a few real benefits of Macs, such as the MacBook Air's portability.
In an accompanying YouTube video shared by Apple, comedian Martin Herlihy shows a group of high school students how to effectively use The Parent Presentation.
Apple has marked as private its day-old The Parent Presentation video on YouTube, meaning that it is no longer available to watch.
Apple has also moved The Parent Presentation to the bottom of its College Students page, effectively burying it. When we reported on the marketing campaign yesterday, the presentation was prominently featured at the top of the page.
I wouldn’t describe it as “cringe”, but I also wouldn’t describe it as “funny”.
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It’s also not the least bit offensive, so it really is unclear why Apple pulled it.
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One obvious problem with “The Parent Presentation” video is that the gist is that everyone involved is stupid: high school kids (the ostensible target audience?) are too stupid to know how to ask their parents for a MacBook for college, parents are too stupid to know they should buy their kids a good laptop, and even Herlihy’s lecturer is a doofus who himself doesn’t know how to deliver a presentation. I don’t know how this got past the concept stage.
To top things off, the downloadable slide presentation — which Apple still has available in Keynote, PowerPoint, and Google Slides formats — is entirely typeset in Arial.
Here’s why the ad doesn’t work: It features a shady salesman. The implication is that you have to be shady to convince someone to buy a Mac (which makes no sense given that Apple arguably makes the best laptops, with the highest quality hardware and OS). The tone of the ad is off base relative to the real-world value proposition of a Mac.
The “presentation” is reminiscent of other shady sales pitches, like selling timeshares or any disreputable door-to-door business of the past (expensive vacuums, magazine subscriptions, etc).
I understand it’s trying to be funny (and I also found the comedian to be funny), but the tone and connotation of the ad don’t align with Apple’s brand. Don Draper would not have greenlit this.
It seems to come from the same place as the ad about forgetting the husband’s birthday.
Previously:
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My thoughts exactly - it's a similar theme to the AI ads, which were distasteful in my opinion. They showcase dishonest or low human behavior. I don't know what they're thinking with these.
I'm wondering who gave the green light for this "short" video which is way too long considering how embarrassing it is after 2 seconds.
Also the slides are really really bad. It's not just the font. It's also the layout of every single slide in this deck. This looks like something made with PowerPoint on Windows 3.11 in the 90's.
The buck stops with Joz on these and all the AI ads. They all seem to be in really poor taste, and maybe it's just me, but Joz gives off a bit of a slimeball vibe in interviews — the kind of vibe that aligns pretty well with the one oozing from these ads.
They look bad, they are tone deaf, and they are condescending. They also all have a weirdly dark/drab look to them, which seems so mismatched with Apple. It all feels really un-Apple-like, but I guess this is just what the new Apple is like.
There's no great mystery here, the people in charge just have bad taste.
@Raleway_ thank you. I don't want to keep calling these people out by name, but I would have typed almost verbatim about Joz. He seems condescending and out of touch, not what you want from the marketing director.
The entire last year has been full of Apple blunders, but a great many of them were caused or made worse by marketing.
Thank you @Raleway_ and @bart. When the marketing director spoke at the Talk Show Live From WWDC 2022 about the general sense in the latter half of the 2010s that Apple no longer cared about the Mac, "this idea that we were going to try to kill [the Mac] was just repugnant," I concluded that he was completely out of touch as well.
(To be clear, they still don't care about the Mac. Just look at how they slowly bastardized the Mac UI.)
Ads that visibly try-hard and fail to appeal to young people get widely mocked, according to my incursions into French TikTok.
I wouldn't describe most of those “try-hard” ads as cringe but fellow TikTok users strongly disagree.
Apple’s retreat has nothing to do with the ad lacking in moral values as reported by the Macintosh community, I’m guessing.
(Ironically, the Parent Presentation template teaches how to make a convincing peesentation and is actually good in the push-the-human-race-forward department.)
I’m unwilling to reinstall TikTok to validate my thesis at the moment, sorry.
Neither Windows, Office, Chromebooks, nor Google Sheets come with Helvetica, by the way.
