Ken Segall:
Recently, Apple hired Tor Myhren as VP of Marketing Communications. He comes from Grey, where he was the global chief creative officer and president of the NY office.
To borrow some new Star Wars terminology, he’s a big deal in advertising.
On the surface, Tor’s hiring is what it is. But if you look a bit deeper, there are all sorts of juicy implications.
To better appreciate, one must first understand how Apple’s marketing has worked in the past, Steve Jobs-style.
I’ve been following this behind the scenes story for a few years now. The most interesting aspect of this, besides the fact that a world-class ad agency guy would go “behind the wall” to work internally is Segall’s statement that Myhren will be reporting directly to Cook and not Schiller. We’ll see the fruits of this hire inside six months.
They should just make the products fun to use again. Five years ago, Apple products sold themselves. The advertising was either just the product, or just somebody using the product. Sold.
Today, all my relatives constantly ask me the exact same questions about their Apple products that they used to ask about their Windows PC’s. They can’t do X that they used to be able to do, or they want to stop the product from doing Y that they don’t want it to do, or they are just mystified by the jumbo jet dashboard that the software has become, except instead of everything being laid out in front of you like a dashboard, everything is hidden in mystifying layers of identical-looking magazine layouts. Unless you are a tech blogger, you just struggle like people have struggled for years with Outlook, memorizing paths through the interface to get the barest of tasks accomplished.
I can say that my spending at Apple Store is less than 10% of what it was in 2012. Solely because the software sucks and all of the delight and art and fun has been stripped out of the products. No amount of advertising is going to change that. You can’t get my enthusiasm up for getting new hardware that runs crappy software that always feels like running Excel.
I updated my mother’s Mac and iPhone to the latest versions of their operating systems the other night. It took hours! I had to enter her Apple ID password over 20 times to update the iPhone. It presented me with questions that were so cryptic and techie that I had to use Google in order to answer them. We only updated the Mac because FaceTime had stopped working, and she had to put in a credit card to get the free update, which made her suspicious. And then she had to learn all-new icons for everything, which was a lot more work than she was expecting. It was a terrible, awful experience that made me regret every time I recommended Apple gear to somebody. Now they are all going through tech blog BS hell. They went from asking me tech questions about Windows to sending me photos and movies and blogs they made with their Apple gear, and then in the last few years, back to asking me tech questions about their Apple gear.
What would be better is if Apple hired an accomplished editor and made them Editor-in-Chief who would represent the needs of users. For example, instead of iOS 11 having a bunch more tech blog nerd features, an Editor-in-Chief would say “iOS 11 will not have a Settings app — go make that work.” They would reject any dialog box they didn’t understand, which would be 99% of them, and the designers and coders would have to do real product development, not just play around to impress each other with chamfered edges and new programming languages.
Good luck to Mr. Myhren. Maybe he can figure out how to make crashy spreadsheets seem sexy. What a waste of time.