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Apple Wins Prestigious Advertising Award for iPad Mini Magazine Campaign

Apple and TBWA Media Arts Lab have won a Grand Prix for Press award at the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity, one of the most prestigious awards in advertising.

The award is for the iPad mini campaign where Apple put actual covers of magazines on a life-size mockup of the mini to show how magazines could be read on the device. The ads ran on the back of the magazine from which they took their cover. A number of publications received the treatment.

Ipadminitime
AdAge reports that Apple won largely because, according to category judge Marcello Serpa, "we were looking at a piece that makes print, the category itself, a hero."

Apple's iPad Mini campaign by TBWA Media Arts Lab won the Grand Prix in press, a category that the tablet once seemed designed to kill but now is offering what jury president Marcello Serpa described as redemption by enabling readership of print products.

[…]

Why it won: "It has a kind of guerrilla feeling," Mr. Serpa said. "It's a product that goes inside the media and says I'm going to kill you, [then] I'm going to save you. Let's embrace. It's redemption."

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Top Rated Comments

Reason077 Avatar
173 months ago
Basically all they did was put the image of the cover in the iPad mini?
Haven't you ever watched Mad Men? Smart people spend a lot of time and effort coming up with stuff like this! There was probably a lot of conflict and drama along the way, too. ;)
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Drunken Master Avatar
173 months ago
Basically all they did was put the image of the cover in the iPad mini?

I guess their less is more approach actually worked.

Basically all anyone does is just something, right?

Basically Apple just makes awesome devices.

Basically those guys in space suits just landed on the moon.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Ubele Avatar
173 months ago
"It has a kind of guerrilla feeling," Mr. Serpa said. "It's a product that goes inside the media and says I'm going to kill you, I'm going to save you. Let's embrace. It's redemption."

What a load or pseudo intellectualist bullshine.
Break it down in to sections. Means nothing. The Plain English Campaign would have a field day with that waffle.

Pretentious cak!

Thanks

From a semiotic standpoint (going beyond a purely traditional Sausserian definition of semiology, of course), the ad is brilliant: it deconstructs the opposition between print and a skeumorphic reinterpretation of print, and then reassembles them into synergistic Other that is simultaneously foreign and familiar, at least to Western sensibilities. To merely call it Postmodern is to diminish the non-ironic reference to Neoplatonism that has always been central to Apple's modus operandi (e.g., "It's magical!"). Only the imbecilic and the ignorant, having seen this ad, would claim that Apple no longer innovates.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
173 months ago
Funny how you don't see MS getting awarded for their recent ads...

What, an award for noting that their device has a stand...
and
it
clicks?
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
BruceEBonus Avatar
173 months ago
"It has a kind of guerrilla feeling," Mr. Serpa said. "It's a product that goes inside the media and says I'm going to kill you, I'm going to save you. Let's embrace. It's redemption."

What a load or pseudo intellectualist bullshine.
Break it down in to sections. Means nothing. The Plain English Campaign would have a field day with that waffle.

Pretentious cak!

Thanks
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
bchery21 Avatar
173 months ago
It was a simple and clever ad.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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