Start something new
Casting eleven artists, then getting out of the way.
Eleven artists across eleven countries, briefed to make something new on the products themselves. The work ran globally in 400 stores and online.
Every brand says its product makes you more creative. Proving it is harder. Apple needed a New Year's Day campaign that showed what people actually do with the products, which meant the campaign couldn't be about the products at all. It had to be about the work, and the work had to be good enough to stand on its own in a gallery.
THE CHALLENGE
Cast the campaign. The entire thing rested on who was in it. I curated the roster of eleven artists across Germany, Vietnam, Australia and elsewhere, and briefed each one to make something new on an Apple device that was genuinely theirs. Aerial photography, light drawings, fluid landscapes, nature illustration. If the work had looked like product demos, the campaign would have failed, so the selection was the creative decision. Briefed for range, not for consistency. Eleven artists working across iPhone, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Mac and Apple Watch, in different disciplines and different countries, had to produce a body of work that held together without looking art directed into sameness. One artist tethered Apple Watch to iPhone to draw with light. Built it for the environments it had to live in. The work ran as backlit LED panels in roughly 400 Apple stores, as individual artist profiles and an online gallery, and as curated App Store collections of the apps the artists used. Free in-store workshops turned it from something to look at into something to try.
WHERE I CAME IN
ROLE
ACD, Design
CLIENT: Apple
SCOPE: Social content strategy, Art direction, Design, voice of brand
IMPACT
Launched across 19 countries
Approximately 400 Apple stores worldwide carried the artwork
Artist event at the West 14th Street store in NYC
Coverage in TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Juxtapoz, MacRumors, Cult of Mac, AppleInsider and 9to5Mac
Effervescence "VIisualizing the Power of Gravity." Made with iPhone6s and Macbook Pro by Greg Barth