Couple of disclosures, up front, since I'm going to be writing about Apple. I head the PR account at Waggener Edstrom for Microsoft. Microsoft competes with Apple. Keep this in mind. :)
Over the years, I've spent a fair amount of time admiring the way that Apple does PR, especially around product announcements. They are good at it. They build suspense, they surprise, they tantalize, they deliver. More precisely, Steve Jobs delivers. He's one of the best presenters, best showmen, best product design people around. Microsoft tends to have a different model for product news than Apple does, especially for big products. Because Microsoft works as a platform player with so many hardware and software vendors, it turns out it's hard to really surprise, and in fact it can be counterproductive, because if you surprise partners and customers too much, they aren't very happy with you. Anyway, back to Apple. The concept of holding news, building expectations and then unveiling a massive surprise has been super effective, and no more so than last year with the iPhone. It was a tour de force from a communications standpoint. This recent Macworld? Not so much. There is good coverage, and lots of it, but watching the liveblogging I could see some trends.
1. The audience was whipped into a frenzy early, and gave some of the early pieces of news more credence than they'll get "upon further review" to quote an Apple ad.
2. The fact that the "hobby" Apple TV got a whole refresh was not noted in the first round of coverage, but sure was in the second -- the product was a conspicuous failure first time out, and lots of lipstick on the pig second time around will be needed.
3. The Air, the hero of the show, reminds me just a bit too much of the cube. Great design, gorgeous, beautiful -- market failure. Think I'm stretching? Lots of comparisons -- closed, underpowered, etc. One of the best laptops I ever had was the Powerbook Duo210 -- so if you slap a docking station into the mix with the Air, let me carry a second battery, then maybe....
Most importantly though, the event and news today made me wonder if the Apple PR model of hold and surprise was wearing thin. Steve Jobs is the only one at Apple who really breaks news. The company tends to only make news a few times a year. It is super closed -- no blogs, no ongoing communication, most stories/blogs etc. tied to news events. The image of the company is framed a ton via ads and not PR -- certainly a safe way of doing things, and super super controlled. But the world has changed. The Feiler Faster Thesis holds that the pace of information and people's ability to retain/accept more information and process it faster than ever before is driving faster news cycles, and that we, as information consumers, are better at taking the information and digesting it. So in this world, is a twice a year news bang sufficient? The answer could be yes -- but there is little room for events like today in that world. Apple stepped to the plate today, IMHO, and hit....a single. The company won't be up to bat again for a while....if you are only up a few times a year, you better hit some home runs.
I've never been a big fan of "giving up control of the message" or "information wants to be free" or "user generated content will rule the world" or "it's all about the conversation." But I'm a huge believer in the value of ongoing communication, to the right audiences, about the topics they care most about, in a regular, sustained way. I guess in baseball terms that makes me a proponent of "small ball" instead of home run ball.
John Markoff at the NYT Bits Blog wrote about his interview with Jobs after the keynote. It's worth a read. I'd say that Jobs also read the New Yorker story about the death of reading, based on this quote:
Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
You heard it here first: Apple has an ebook reader in the works. :) Think I'm joking? Go back and look at what Jobs said about phones and TV and subnotebooks just before he unleashed Apple versions on the world....
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