Apple (AAPL) was once the king of advertising, from its iconic 1984 Macintosh advertisement to its simplistic iPhone commercials. The Cupertino-based company has seemingly been slacking as of late, however. Its slew of celebrity-endorsed Siri commercials are annoying even to some of the company’s devout followers, and its latest “Genius” campaign has been called embarrassing. According to the ad research firm Ace Metrix, which measures effectiveness of ads by showing them to 500 consumers and scoring them in areas such as persuasiveness and likelihood of watching again, Google’s (GOOG) “Camping” advertisement is more effective than Apple’s latest TV spot. The Nexus 7 commercial scored a 662 out of a possible 950, and was the most-effective TV spot to debut in the last week and the most-effective technology spot in the last 90 days.
Google has found success in its recent advertisements for the Chrome Web browser and Google+ social networking site because of its connection to human emotion. The Nexus 7 advertisement has found even great success due to its demonstration of product utility according to the firm, which is typically one of Apple’s strengths, according to Ace Metrix’s vice president of marketing Jonathan Symonds.
“Google has taken their strong emotional appeal and married that with strong product demonstration,” Symonds told Ad Age.
Rather than focusing on a product, Apple’s latest advertisements focus on a service, and the majority of them haven’t been effective. Symonds notes that the Genius on the street commercial scored in the bottom quintile, although the one on a plane was in the upper-middle quintile.
