Design @ Metal

The Media Arts Lab is an advertising agency like no other. Based at a discreet address, it is thought to employ more than 50 people but has only one client. However, finding information about MAL is not easy.

Go to its website and there is just a holding page, with no mention that this is even an ad agency. The only clue that this might be a business of some significance is that there are phone numbers for four offices in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beijing.

Amazingly, there is no other detail, no addresses, no names of staff - and certainly no mention of its client. The reason is that this client is surprisingly secretive despite being one of the world’s biggest and most popular brands, famed for introducing the iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac and more.

The client, of course, is Apple. And the fact that its late boss Steve Jobs felt the need for his company to have its own dedicated ad agency speaks volumes. Apple not only did marketing brilliantly but also unlike anyone else.

From a marketer’s point of view, Apple was and is the ultimate challenger brand: modern and egalitarian, offering impeccably designed, user-friendly products at a premium price, and always innovating - moving from computers to music, mobiles and tablets.

But Apple could also behave in ways that other consumer brands would not dream of doing - by being secretive, not using an external PR agency, sometimes not bothering to respond to journalists, and so on.

Jobs set the tone and certainly understood the power of advertising to build the brand from the early days.

The 1984 Superbowl ad for the Apple Macintosh was a seminal moment. Directed by Ridley Scott, it was hugely expensive and featured a female heroine defying conformity, with the message that 1984 “wouldn’t be like 1984”, a reference to the George Orwell novel. The attack on the status quo was also seen as a thinly veiled swipe at rival IBM.

Importantly, the ad was made by Lee Clow, then a creative chief at Apple’s ad agency Chiat/Day, which went on to become part of TBWA. That relationship has continued to the present day. Clow chairs MAL, which was founded in 2006 and is based in CA, to ensure that TBWA had a subsidiary that could service Apple’s needs exclusively.

Jobs’ close relationship with Clow, shows that he had a conventional attitude to advertising. He valued a long-term relationship with a creative agency. “What Steve Jobs did was simply make everything and everyone better,” said Clow last week. “He was the best client we ever had.”

However, Jobs was an unusual client who had such vision that he had little time for market research.

“Two characteristics made handling Apple’s advertising utterly different from any other account: an obsession with secrecy and an absolute autocracy,” recalls Andrew McGuinness, UK boss of TBWA from 2002 to 2005. “Steve and Lee would meet weekly for several hours to agree direction. Apple marketing was a tight, incredibly centrally run team with ideas being agreed in Cupertino and then being disseminated across the world via the TBWA network.”

McGuinness, now boss of independent agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay, adds: “Steve had the same relentless focus on detail on communications as he did on his products. Every letter, every TV ad, every poster that ran anywhere in the world would be OK’d personally by Steve. He truly was the Brand Manager of Apple.”

Clearly such thinking motivated the decision by Jobs and Clow to create MAL in 2006. Apple wanted something that a typical agency couldn’t offer: namely strategy, planning, creative, digital, media and production all under one roof - plus confidentiality.

It might seem obvious that a brand would want to have an integrated approach to marketing yet it is rare. Unlike Apple, most brands tend to use an array of agencies. Industry insiders suggest that the only reason Apple can make it work is because decision-making is so heavily centralized. MAL now employs over 200 people globally, according to TBWA, part of US ad giant Omnicom.

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Design @ Metal is about design, business, technology, branding, social media, inspiration.
Metal is a strategic multidisciplined design firm in beautiful San Francisco.
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By Gideon Spanier