Check out apple.com, and click on “watch the TV ad” on the homepage. Did you do it? OK, get going…I’ll wait…… If you watched the video, then you witnessed a top shelf example of advertising that is effective because it impacts its audience in an emotional way. Yes, great advertising touches an emotional chord with its intended audience. It’s a delicate balance between hitting you in the gut, and effectively communicating something about a company, product or service. This is the difference between good and great. The difference that is missed by the those that minimize the value of creative…who say that one “pretty picture” is as good as the next. I don’t agree with this simplistic opinion. In fact, the work that results from this philosophy often looks amateurish…sort of like a school project (no offense to the talented and creative students out there). Now listen, I get it…not everything has to be a Hollywood masterpiece. I’ve seen some great work resulting from crowdsourcing for a few hundred bucks. Certainly some initiatives require a straightforward approach, and can be adequately handled via mass produced methods. I have however, been around long enough to see the difference between good, and great messaging. As with any discipline in life, there is a fine line separating the two. Whether it’s playing an instrument, professional sales, surgery, or even flying a plane…there’s something that separates the top tier from the rest. So now back to the Apple TV spot. If you didn’t accept my earlier invitation to see the video for yourself, I’ll explain. The spot shows a family engaging in holiday activities such as baking, tree trimming, etc. One of the family members is a teenage boy who is barely involved in the fun…in fact, he’s paying more attention to his iPhone than his family. Various family members try to get his attention, but get marginal results while he stays focused on his iPhone (those of you who have teens can picture this scene almost perfectly). You as the viewer believe that it’s a typical family teenager scene…until the end. Get ready ‘cause here it comes…at the end we see that what the teen was doing the whole time on his iPhone was creating a holiday home video…a touching family video that contains edited clips of the activities the teen seemed to be ignoring while staring at his phone. He was actually shooting the video with the phone all the while. Now despite the fact that this is a branding ad, I believe it’ll sell products in the short term. Many Apple aficionados out there will undoubtedly see this commercial and think of the myriad Apple products that were used to create and play that video (iPhone, iMovie, Apple TV and more). I would wager that these and others will soon be in the market to create their own masterpiece.