College faculty may think they have much guidance to impart to younger generations, but tech-savvy students prove they know best in Apple‘s cheeky back-to-school campaign.
Emmy-winning commercial director Tony Kuntz and Oscar-winning Oppenheimer cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema produced three 30-second spots for the campaign by agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab. The ads begin with a creepy mood that soon switches to comedy, as the cast of students ward off advice from older faculty who think they know everything about laptops.
But the young people have already made a smart decision by getting Macs for campus.
“Found” depicts a young woman who misplaces her laptop in the school’s ivy-lined corridor. As she looks for it, the music strikes up an ominous note and a professor, played by Resident Alien and Reservation Dogs star Gary Farmer, warns her that computers tend to vanish around here and get sold off for parts.
She interrupts him by using Apple’s Find My feature to ping the device, and walks off relieved even as he calls out a cryptic message about finding herself.
The other two spots employ the same framework. In “Charged,” a professor warns a student that she is “playing a dangerous game” by using her laptop in the first class of the day without a charger. His musings about life and death are rendered moot when she points out that her Mac’s battery will last all day.
And in “Powered,” a student working on a design project in the school’s library is cautioned against stressing his device by running multiple apps. But because his laptop uses Apple silicon, it’s running fine rather than crashing.
The contrasting dialogue showcasing the device’s features is reminiscent of Apple’s classic “Mac vs. PC” campaign from 2006. These are the first Mac commercials with dialogue since those ads.
The work also builds on last year’s “You Think That’s Hard Work?” campaign, which showcased the MacBook’s versatility as a tool for procrastinating college students along with professors, writers and coders.