Back when Steve Jobs was trying to convince then-Pepsi executive John Sculley to come over to Apple, he famously asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” If one anonymous ad exec quoted by AdAge is any indication, Sculley probably should have said he’d rather sell sugar water.
In a new piece talking about Apple’s big campaign to recruit more people for its internal marketing team, AdAge quotes some executives who say that Apple just isn’t as “cool” as it used to be and say that Google is now perceived as the stronger brand. While it’s true that Google has overtaken Apple to become the world’s most valuable brand in some marketing studies, other studies show that Apple still retains its No. 1 spot. What’s more, it’s not as though Apple’s brand power has completely fallen off the map — at the very worst, it’s “only” the second-most valuable brand in the tech world.
Nonetheless, that didn’t stop one ad exec from telling AdAge that marketing sugar water would give him more creative opportunities than marketing Macs and iPhones.
“I don’t feel that energy from Apple,” said one “top agency exec” who turned down a post at Apple. “The revolution has come and gone, and I’m not sure a job at Apple would be a creative opportunity. If I were going to go brand-side, there are a lot more interesting companies I’d rather work for, like Coke or Pepsi.”
That said, not every ad exec interviewed by AdAge was as dismissive of Apple as this ad exec — another told the publication that “there are probably only a handful of places that have that level of expectation of quality and can afford to pay people to do work to make it successful” as Apple does.
