Apple’s Tor Myhren on the secret to doing great advertising that works

Tor Myhren distilled seven years of leading Apple’s advertising and marketing into a half-hour of tips and tricks Thursday in a presentation before a packed house at the Cannes Lions Festival.

The former Grey Worldwide creative leader, who’s been Apple’s VP of marketing communications since 2015, opened with a five-minute video montage of the brand’s greatest advertising hits from his tenure. He then took the audience, step by step, through the process and philosophy behind Apple’s consistently celebrated work.

Here’s some of the wisdom he imparted:

Agencies are forever

Myhren said there’s nobody better at concise and compelling storytelling than agencies—a theme he also emphasized the last time he was on the Lumière theater stage, back in 2019, when Apple was Cannes’ Creative Marketer of the Year.

“The other secret weapon is you are an outsider,” he added. “You can pay anyone to agree with you—that’s not very interesting. You want someone pushing you, scaring you, pushing the edges, forcing us to see things from a different perspective. And it’s way easier to pull you back than it is to push you further. So push further on your own.”

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Embrace the product

Myhren gave some fun background on the genesis of “The Underdogs,” the three-part series of comic short films featuring a group of co-workers collaborating using Apple products.

The brief for that business-to-business campaign, he said, was to “show all the products, every single one of them—and by the way, please explain how the ecosystem works as well.” No one was very excited about that brief at first, he said, but soon they found a fun way in. The three resulting films, he said, contain a total of 697 individual product shots—yet still manage to be very entertaining.

Myhreh said the second of the three spots was his favorite—the one where the Underdogs are working from home. And the third spot, he pointed out, won the 2022 Film Grand Prix. “So you can’t tell me product advertising can’t be big at Cannes,” he said. “If you embrace the product, it makes a huge difference.”

Strategy is sacrifice

In classic Apple style, Myhren said it’s much more valuable to be reductive than additive in the creative process—with the company’s advertising mirroring its product development in that regard.

“Eliminate almost everything in the strategy to get to the thing,” he said. “The best strategies are narrow, they’re tiny, they could dance on the head of a pin. Strip it down and squeeze all the artifice out of it, so you can get to the truth. And the truth is the best strategy.”

Media is art

Myhren gave a shout-out to Apple’s media team—led by Magdalen Kennedy, its in-house senior director of worldwide media, as well as Monica Karo, chief client officer at media partner OMD—for making an art form of how and where Apple’s advertising shows up in the world.

“We say that if you’re going to put it out into the world, make whatever space you’re putting it in better,” he said. “Let’s be honest, most advertising makes that area, that space, that banner ad, that part of your feed worse. And that’s why you skip past it. How can you make it better so it beautifies and does not pollute?”

As evidence of Apple beautifying ad spaces, he pointed to the outdoor advertising for AirPods, including the colorful silhouette billboards that recall the old iPod+iTunes campaign. (“We just ripped this off from 20 years ago, obviously,” he said.) 

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He also pointed to the giant window decals showing people dancing that Apple installed at its retail stores worldwide, as well as the billboards for “Ted Lasso” on Apple TV+ that featured letters written to U.S. Men’s National Team players headed to last year’s World Cup. The clever media twist there was posting the billboards in each player’s hometown, in all sorts of unexpected spots.

Layers are killers

Another useful reductive process, Myhren added, is getting rid of unnecessary layers in the creative process.

“I’m really talking about approval layers,” he said. “I’ve never been part of a truly great creative piece of work that had multiple layers between where the idea is presented and the person who's buying it. At pretty much every layer, it tends to get worse.”

Reinvent the demo

Myhren also brought up Apple’s long-running “Shot on iPhone” campaign, which advertises the iPhone’s camera by showing the kind of still and video images it’s capable of capturing. After showing some “Shot on iPhone” billboards, he played the “Detectives” spot from 2021, which amusingly highlighted the phone’s “Cinematic Mode” and its ability to shift focus.

“I love that ad,” Myhren said. “I think that’s the hardest kind of filmmaking—one shot, and it’s all shot on the iPhone, with no edits. And brilliant acting. There’s a five-second pause of silence in there, which is really hard when you're making an ad, to say, ‘Just don’t say anything for five seconds.’ Pretty fun.” 

Be brutally objective

Myhren said too many agencies and brands try to convince themselves that mediocre work is adequate, without being honest about its flaws.

“It’s the worst thing you can do,” he said. “You just have to call it out when it’s bad. Then you have to break down with the team why it wasn’t great. You have to learn from when things aren’t great because if you keep pretending like they are, it never gets better.” 

One reliable sign that the work is great, he added, is that “the world will tell you” in the form of likes and views. Making ads that become famous is better than winning awards, he added. “I really believe that. For any brand, famous is better than awards. Although famous usually wins awards.”

Be confident

Myhren also emphasized trusting your own taste, and not relying on focus groups to tell you how you should be communicating with people.

“It doesn’t mean you have to have great taste yourself,” he said. “If you’re a decision maker, you have to surround yourself with people who have great taste, and you have to trust them. Great taste leads to great work. Then you need to have confidence. At Apple, we don’t test our creative—we’ve never tested our creative. We believe that we know, better than a group of [consumers] in a room, what we want to put out into the world, what it feels like and what it sounds like.”

Have fun

“I don't think we have enough fun in this business anymore,” Myhren said. “Everything’s getting very serious. To do great creative, to do inspiring, optimistic creative, you’ve got to have some fun. I don’t have any answers to how to do that. You guys pick your way of fun.”

Be true to your cause

Myhren wrapped the presentation with a discussion of values—in particular, its recent focus on both privacy and accessibility.

“It has to be true to your brand,” he said of cause-related work. “Just glomming onto a cause, as a brand, is a recipe for disaster. It has to be baked into your DNA. And you have to be making products that live up to it—because otherwise, it’s just advertising and it’s fake.”

He pointed to the privacy features that limit access to data from Apple devices, making it hard for marketers to target Apple users. “Some of you in this room probably hate that. Sorry, not sorry,” he said. 

Finally, he spoke about the iPhone’s accessibility features, which were memorably on display in “The Greatest,” the Kim Gehrig-directed commercial from last December—a Grand Prix winner in Music earlier this week and a top contender for the Film Grand Prix and Titanium Grand Prix on Friday as well.

“There’s dozens and dozens of shots of our product in this—our products actually drive a major part of this film,” he said. “But it’s really about the people and what they’re able to do with our products.”