Apple agreed to acquire Beats for several reasons: for the streaming music service, for the headphones, for the speakers, and to bring Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine into the Cupertino fold. But the New York Post believes that Apple is seeking help from the Beats team for another important area of the Apple business: advertising. It’s no secret in the technology and advertising world that Apple could not be anymore displeased with the services as of late from longtime ad partner TBWA, and unnamed ad agency executives are said to believe that the Beats team could improve Apple’s ads:
Apple’s Phil Schiller is in charge of Apple’s in-house marketing efforts as well as working with TBWA’s Media Arts Lab. Schiller, who took over marketing after Steve Jobs passed away, has clearly become frustrated with the performance of TBWA’s Apple ads as of late. The most recent high profile Apple and Samsung trial revealed emails between Schiller and Tim Cook regarding the poor reception of the ads. In response to these issues, Apple created its own internal team of advertising specialists and has reportedly been playing this internal team against the external TBWA team. However, viewer reception to the internal Apple ads is not much better.
The fashionable Beats brand, which Apple acquired for $3 billion, outmaneuvered official World Cup sponsor Sony with its “Game Before the Game” ad campaign. So many soccer stars sported Beats that Sony had them banned from the arena.
“Apple bought Beats for a lot of reasons,” said one new business executive at a top agency. “They think they’re marketing geniuses. It is safe to assume Beats would be part of an assessment of all [Apple] partners.”
But as ad agency executives believe, CEO Cook even concurs that Beats makes a great TV ad:
Perhaps we’ll see more ads like the above with the Apple logo, instead of the Beats, logo over the next few years.
In other Beats-related news, the winning German World Cup soccer team has been given gold-colored Beats headphones:
