How Apple Missed the Mark with Octavia Spencer Ad

 Apple this month released a video touting its environmental progress that despite its polish and Hollywood star is only so-so funny and out of sync with audiences that are increasingly skeptical of such claims.

The world’s most valuable company hasn’t disclosed the cost of its five-minute video, which was produced inhouse and included hiring Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer, a Peabody-winning director, an accomplished composer and apparently an unlimited budget for patting everyone on the back.

The company could have delivered a message that cuts through the current ESG controversy with humor and a light touch of facts. Deprecating its sustainability efforts could have been funnier, and more newsworthy, than promoting them. Marketing spin only fuels criticism from across the political spectrum.

“Monumental greenwashing,” according to a critique co-authored by a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.

“It fits with a certain sour mood on the Left,” a senior writer at the National Review website wrote.

Let’s take a closer look.

Funny?
“Mother Nature” was part of Apple’s annual product extravaganza on Sept. 12, 2023. Spencer won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for “The Help” in 2011. She was nominated in the same category for “Hidden Figures” (2016) and “The Shape of Water” (2017).

She’s no stranger to Apple. Her series, “Truth Be Told,” ran on Apple TV+ for three seasons before it was canceled in in April.

In the video, Spencer plays Mother Nature, who meets CEO Tim Cook and the sustainability team in a conference room in Apple’s lavish headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

“Mother Nature needs a status report—the concept of the film alone kinda says it all,” Tor Myhren, Apple’s vice president of marketing communications, told Ad Age.

The Apple marketing team is experienced at combining humor with corporate information, including “Apple at Work — The Underdogs,” an occasional series of long-form commercials launched four years ago.

Some of the comedy falls as flat as a dad joke. Even one of the video’s defenders, Jason Aten, tech columnist for Inc. magazine, called it “cringeworthy.”

The awkwardness contributes to the funniest moment in the video. An Apple executive says the company is using 100% recycled aluminum in the cases of Mac books, TVs and watches.

Mother Nature asks, “What about iPod shuffle?”

Everyone looks mystified. Production of the audio player stopped six years ago.

She says, “It’s a joke. Don’t you people make ‘Ted Lasso’?”

Another exec hesitantly adds, “It’s a different group.”

Green message
Apple did not respond to emails with written questions sent to its public relations team.

Spencer doesn’t play the Mother Nature of floods and forest fires, whose frequency and intensity are growing because of global warming. After the threat of a thunderstorm that quickly goes away, Mother Nature arrives to review the company’s sustainability performance.

“She’s got a lot of questions, and fortunately our 2030 plan [to become carbon neutral] has a lot of answers,” Myhren said.

Mother Nature never challenges the company’s claims, although she expresses skepticism with her tone and facial expressions. Instead, she calls out topics and accepts responses: Materials? Check. Electricity? Check. Transportation? Check. Water? Check.

The video ends with a nearly minute-long plug for what the company calls its first carbon neutral product, a line of watches.

One of the many critiques of the ad came from Laure Legros, an executive with a Sidney-based nonprofit that supports workers’ efforts to change their employers’ environmental practices. Here’s how she described the video’s ending for advertising news site B&T:

Mother Nature “begrudgingly warms up. Commends them on their efforts, even, and leaves cautiously satisfied,” she wrote. “The boardroom erupts with relief. Backs are patted. They’ve done it.”

Yet everyone knows it’s not that simple.

“The credibility of Apple’s environmental claims is a little fuzzier than the razzle-dazzle would have you believe,” a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist wrote about the ad.

Another approach
Apple is an unquestioned leader in its efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. It deserves credit for continuing to promote its commitment to sustainability at a time when some companies are stepping back. Yet leadership carries with it a special responsibility.

Widespread suspicion about ESG efforts makes traditional public relations and marketing poor tools to persuade people.  Instead of boasting about accomplishments, Apple would do well to touch on the profit motive for its sustainability program.

That point is absent from the video, says Steven Sinofsky, former president of the Windows division of Microsoft, an investor and author of the Hardcore Software newsletter.

In a lengthy thread on X, he wrote: “Every fact or position put forth is a strategic, margin-positive, and innovative effort from Apple. Super important”

Apple would earn more trust by emphasizing the challenges to reaching its ambitious goal to decarbonize.

Focus on the second half of this line by Cook: “We’ve innovated and retooled almost every part of our process to reduce our impact on the planet, but there’s still a lot more work to do.”

What kind of work? Here are three ideas, drawn in part from one of Apple’s own sustainability reports:

• Why does the company make it hard to repair and reuse its products?
• Apple’s wants to reduce all emissions by 61.7% by 2030. So far, the reduction is just 11.9%. Plenty for a worrywart to stew over.
• Reducing the company’s dependance on carbon offsets, such as planting trees that absorb carbon from the air, to reach its goal. Those credits are of dubious effectiveness.

I’ll leave for another day the jokes to go with these topics. But these are the folks that make Ted Lasso.

Mother Nature
In the 1970s, a long-running TV commercial shows Mother Nature mistaking margarine for butter. The narrator says, “Chiffon’s so delicious it fooled even you, Mother Nature.”

“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” she says.

The ecosystem might not be as easy to placate as Apple suggests.

Tom Corfman is an attorney and senior consultant with Ragan Consulting Group, where he leads the Environmental, Social and Governance communications practice. He prefers butter … in small servings.

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