The fans wrote the ads. They thought they were writing App Store reviews.
The brief was to celebrate the winners. We saw a chance to also show why they won, that it was as much about what fans loved as what Apple regarded as great. And we found the proof in the reviews. So the campaign became Loved by You. Awarded by Us.
ROle
Art Direction · Creative Direction · Content Direction · Global Team Leadership · Production Sourcing
CLIENT
Apple
AGENCy
AKQA
SCOPE
Global campaign · Eight localized :15 spots · :60 hero film · Live event · Interactive installation
The problem
It started as a simple ask: make a social video campaign celebrating the year's best apps and games. Digging into it, we found the more interesting problem. The celebration had always looked polished and had never explained why a winner won. The criteria were a complex mix of what Apple valued and how much people loved using the thing, and none of that was visible from the outside.
What I did
Led a global team, including people senior to me. I ran the work across agency heads in France and Brazil, their teams, and my own in San Francisco, where the idea came from.
Let the fans write it. We mined App Store reviews across markets for lines that read like love letters to the products. Real testimonials did more work than any headline we could have written. The catch is that a fan's phrasing is the whole point, and some languages turn a short line into a very long one, so every quote had to hold its meaning and still fit a :15 in every market Apple sells in.
Made the assets from nothing. Developers handed us zero creative, so we built the raw material ourselves: gameplay capture, screen recordings, and in one case shooting content through an app's own tools, including a long exposure sequence shot on iPhone using Spectre Camera, one of the year's winners. It was a scrappy production. I stood in as a model and a stunt driver.
Impact
Apple bought an additional :60 hero film on top of the program
All films localized across Apple's global markets
Apple's first-ever physical media event for the App Store awards
PRESS: Covered by TechCrunch, CNBC, 9to5Mac and MacRumors
The :60 Apple bought after seeing the category spots, cut from the same source: things people had already written about apps they loved.
Eight :15 spots, one per category, each built on reviews mined from the App Store in that market. Every quote had to hold its meaning at :15 in every language it ran in.
With no assets from the developers, we shot the raw material ourselves. This long exposure sequence was captured on an iPhone using Spectre Camera, one of the year's winners, so the app made its own campaign footage.
A surprise New York event for the creators behind the winning apps, with a live interactive iPad wall built so the client's own team could run and hand it off on site.
