What Apple’s hand-embroidered product launch reveals about advertising in the age of AI slop
Source: Fortune ·
As AI-generated ads multiply, Apple’s handmade campaigns show how the people behind the work can become part of the pitch.
From the source
To promote its latest product launch, Apple—one of the world’s biggest technology companies—picked up a needle and thread. In this era of AI food slop, AI agents behind plush toys with eerie smiles, and deepfakes that make it harder to trust what’s real, the human touch could become a selling point on its own. Showing that someone took the time to make something by hand gives brands a way to signal care, creativity, and attention to detail. The effort—along with the small imperfections that reveal a human hand—can become part of the appeal, potentially making a brand feel worth paying more for. There’s early evidence it works. An Ipsos study with Syracuse University tested 20 advertisements with 3,000 U.S. consumers and found that human-made ads scored, on average, 14% higher on predicted short-term sales effectiveness and 17% higher on long-term brand health than AI-generated alternatives. “Human-made might become more of a luxury over time,” Stijn van Osselaer, a Cornell University…