Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works (15 page)

After college, he worked at a consulting firm in San Francisco, where Pixar and later Apple were clients. He joined Apple in 2001, ultimately reported directly to Steve Jobs, and is considered the final word on every piece of marketing material except for advertising. His domain, as explained in his Cal Poly bio, provides another piece of insight into the Apple penchant for integration. “With over 200 creatives under his supervision, his team has been responsible for all of the packaging, retail store graphics, website, on-line store, direct marketing, videos, and event graphics for Apple globally for the past decade,” the bio reads. “His team is a combination of Art Directors, Writers, Motion Graphic Designers, Developers, and Designers… The team is unique in that it is the only one of its size that can design, produce, and engineer all of the communications work from every creative discipline all in-house.” Inside Apple, Asai is known as a silent force who understood what Jobs thought about the Apple brand and knew, said one colleague, “how to channel Steve.” Asai also is known for his youthful appearance. Said an executive who worked with him: “He looks like he just got out of third-period design class.”

As for advertising, Apple had a distinctive approach under Steve Jobs. He considered advertising a key part of marketing, and he managed it himself. He met weekly with Lee Clow, the creative director for TBWA\Chiat\Day, Apple’s longtime agency. Jobs also took a direct interest in where the ads ran. He favored TV shows that fit the sensibility of Apple’s perceived customer.
Modern Family
,
The Daily Show
, and
Family Guy
were favorites. Smarter reality TV like
The Amazing Race
was preferred over the more mean-spirited
Survivor
. Jobs once flew off into a
rage when an Apple spot accidentally found its way onto Glenn Beck’s program on the Fox News Channel. Jobs detested Fox News, but he generally didn’t want Apple to advertise on any political talking-head show.

Jobs remained a believer in print media even as his devices, especially the iPad, were hastening print’s demise. Jobs was particularly enamored with Apple’s full-page ads being positioned on the back covers of major magazines. Pick up a popular magazine to this day, and you’ll likely see an Apple ad on the back. Monica Karo, the executive at OMD charged with buying ads on Apple’s behalf, would periodically attempt to convince Jobs to run ads in new publications. Jobs, the master of publicity, had a stock response: “You worry about the back covers,” he said. “I’ll take care of the front covers.”

So it’s clear, front covers can’t be purchased, at least not in respectable publications. But they are extremely valuable to marketers. Jobs knew better than any business executive in the world how to land himself on the front cover to promote a product. Apple also gets free publicity when its products appear in popular TV shows and films. The company says it never pays for product placement, but in 2010 Apple products appeared 386 times in original broadcast programs, according to Nielsen.

Such publicity is priceless, of course. Shortly before the iPad was released, the company agreed to provide two working units to the hit ABC sitcom
Modern Family
, which built an entire episode around geek-dad Phil Dunphy’s earnest yearning for an iPad, which just happened to be released on his birthday. “It’s like Steve Jobs and God got together to say ‘We love you, Phil,’ ” the character said.

Apple’s built-in advantage is that the creative set uses Apple’s products. “I happen to be an Apple enthusiast and a big gadget freak, so I’m up on this stuff,” said Steve Levitan, the co-creator of
Modern Family
. “The only product I’ve ever waited in line for was an iPhone.” Levitan said the idea for the iPad episode originated creatively. “We’re very selective. We tend to use these products when we want to use them anyway.” He said the creative team was excited to learn that Jobs was a fan of the show. Levitan once arranged to travel to Northern California to meet Jobs, but the meeting fell through. He subsequently dealt regularly with the two Apple executives who are among the best known in Hollywood: iTunes chief Eddy Cue and Suzanne Lindbergh, Apple’s New York–based head of product placements. Lindbergh must also have the coolest title of any Apple honcho: “director buzz.”

O
ne of Apple’s most potent storytelling tools is its muscular use of public relations. Once again, it’s an example of Apple disregarding all the normal rules of corporate life. For Apple, PR is as carefully managed, tight-lipped, and unforgiving as its approach to product design and internal secrecy.

Indeed, Apple thinks different(ly) about something as mundane as who speaks for Apple. When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, precisely five people were authorized to speak to the press about it: Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Greg Joswiak, and Bob Borchers. Joswiak was the vice president for iPhone product marketing, and Borchers worked for him. The two most senior product executives who built the iPhone, hardware boss Tony Fadell and
Scott Forstall, whose team developed the software, were not on that list—and were none too happy, per Borchers, to be excluded from the victory lap in the media.

As the lowest-ranking member of the approved group, Borchers explained the mentality of restricting even senior executives from speaking. “The challenge with those guys is that they’re super smart and they know a lot of details, but they haven’t spent a lot of time in front of the press,” he said. “They’re likely to get asked questions that they know the answers to but that they haven’t learned how to gracefully avoid answering.”

Apple’s public relations department operates not so much on a need-to-know basis as a you-will-not-know basis. It may be the one corner of the company that has most mastered the art of saying no. Members of the PR team have specific assignments, typically organized around product areas. Product is the one subject about which Apple’s PR group will talk, especially to repeat factual information about products in the marketplace. Off-limits questions include unreleased products, personal information about Apple executives, details about future Apple events, and pretty much anything about the inner workings of the company. In a phone call or meeting with an Apple publicist, a journalist is far more likely to be probed for information about upcoming coverage than to be the recipient of anything of value.

Apple’s PR strategy with journalists, hobbyists, and careerists from every corner of the earth is to be extremely judicious about doling out information. It’s a posture almost no other company can take. The norm in the corporate world is for public relations professionals to maintain relationships with reporters. They schmooze
them, flatter them, feed them tidbits—not to mention food and drink—keep abreast of their personal lives, and invite them into the company for periodic updates from senior management.

Apple plays this game only at the highest levels. Katie Cotton, its powerful vice president of worldwide communications, runs the PR apparatus. A slender, sharp-elbowed forty-six-year-old, Cotton worked in the 1990s at a PR agency in Los Angeles, KillerApp Communications, where she represented nascent digital entertainment companies like RealNetworks and Virgin Interactive Entertainment. The agency did work for NeXT, though Cotton did not, and through connections in the Apple-NeXT orbit she ended up at Apple in 1996. Rising to the top of the PR ranks, Cotton ultimately reported directly to Steve Jobs and fiercely guarded his privacy, barring the door to all but a handful of reporters. A gatekeeper for the outside world, she is the enforcer internally, too, coming down hard on any Apple employee, almost no matter how senior, with the mistaken impression that he or she is allowed to speak on behalf of Apple. In a world of men for whom a clean pair of blue jeans counts as business attire, Cotton stands out for her style; her Alexander Wang dresses and shoes are far more Manhattan than San Jose.

Under Cotton’s regime, Apple’s approach makes it no place to learn PR—because PR at Apple is mostly a one-way street. Publicists at other companies, accustomed to a large measure of sycophantism toward journalists and their clients, are fascinated by the undiplomatic ways of Apple. “They are highly aggressive and communicative when they want something from you,” reflected a publicist for a major technology company that is an Apple
partner. “But the moment you’re no longer needed, it’s as if you didn’t exist anymore. They’ll literally stop returning phone calls. Nobody else can do that.”

Apple PR does play favorites. Reporters and editors from a handful of cherished publications with long relationships with the company,
Fortune
magazine among them, enjoy preferential treatment. This is especially true around product launches, when Apple will negotiate exclusive access in return for prominent placement—the front covers Jobs bragged about handling himself. iTunes, for example, was unveiled on the cover of
Fortune
in 2003, featuring a photo of Jobs with the singer Sheryl Crow. The previous year Apple blessed
Time
with an exclusive look at the first flat-panel iMac, with Jobs grinning on a sleek display next to the headline “Flat-out Cool!”

Investors fare no differently with Apple. The company’s two-person investor-relations team doles out precious little information to Wall Street analysts and shareholders, in a way that is unlike any other company’s. Apple holds no analyst day, a routine event at most companies that exposes several hundred investors to upper management, who make presentations about the company’s plans. Jobs treated investors with something between ambivalence and contempt. “He was the only CEO I knew who didn’t meet with investors,” said Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein. “You could be a shareholder with $2 billion worth of stock for five years and never have met Steve Jobs.” Sacconaghi viewed the Apple management team as nearly useless in trying to probe for information, with one exception. “Tim Cook is the only one who would provide some color that was unscripted,” he said.

There is an exception to the rule when it comes to Apple’s communications with the public. Apple actively caters to (as opposed to dictates to) influential product reviewers. Two particularly matter: David Pogue of the
New York Times
and Walt Mossberg of the
Wall Street Journal.
A former Apple iTunes engineer remembered being called at home shortly after his first c Kr ht Mossbhild was born. “David Pogue’s Apple TV was crashing,” the engineer said, referring to the witty and widely read gadget critic. “They wanted me to go through the development logs of David Pogue’s Apple TV. I’m like, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Because what happens is that when there’s a fire, if you want to get it out as fast as possible, you call every single expert. Apple TV was getting ready to release and Apple is very concerned about public perception.”

Pogue, who also writes well-regarded and exceptionally wonky how-to books for computer users, is a key influencer. But no journalist is as important to Apple’s public perception as Walt Mossberg. (In personal-technology circles, the name Walt is nearly as well known as Steve.) A former defense correspondent, Mossberg fashioned himself into the most influential personal-technology critic in the United States by advocating for average consumers, of which he considered himself one. Throughout the second reign of Steve Jobs, Mossberg was a stalwart proponent of Apple’s products, an unabashed cheerleader for Apple’s ease of use and technical superiority over the blandness and complexity of the Microsoft-dominated PC. Jobs rewarded Mossberg with rare appearances at the technology conference Mossberg ran with the Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher, All Things Digital.

If Mossberg disapproved of an Apple product, there was no question whose side Jobs would take. In 2008, when Mossberg, along with many other critics, panned MobileMe, an email synchronization service that was supposed to mimic the functionality offered by the popular BlackBerry smartphone, Jobs erupted. He called a meeting of the MobileMe team and berated them for having disappointed him, themselves, and one another. Worst of all, they had embarrassed Apple publicly. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down. Walt Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.”

Celebrities of all kinds get red-carpet treatment at Apple, which is well aware that pleasing public figures is textbook image management. Steve Doil, an executive in Apple’s operations group in the mid-2000s, tells of the request that found its way to him when the crooner Harry Connick Jr. needed a new monitor for his Mac. “It was my first escalation,” he said, referring to Apple’s process for elevating a typical customer-service request for a VIP. Connick had sent an email to Jobs, said Doil, who forwarded the note to Cook, who passed it along to Deirdre O’Brien, a top procurement executive. “She told me, ‘This is your first Steve request. Don’t disappoint.’ ” Doil dispatched the monitor in thirty-five minutes.

Apple’s approach to PR is unique, but it isn’t unprecedented. In fact, Jobs’s canny behavior as pitchman to the public and flatterer of influential scribes evokes the model set by one of his heroes, Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera. Decades before Jobs spun a vision of Apple and its products, Land mastered the art of corporate
promotion at Polaroid. He staged showy events to reveal big products. Land made sure that reporters for mainstream publications covered his events in addition to the industry journalists who could be relied on to show up. When he unveiled his system for instant photography in 1947, for example, Land invited the
New York Herald Tribune
along with
National Photo Dealer
for his talk to the Optical Society of America. Like Jobs, Land had a special fondness for
Fortune
, according to Land’s biographer, Victor McElheny, author of a tome whose title easily could be an epitaph for Jobs:
Insisting on the Impossible. McElheny noted that Land was so good at promotion, his inventions were featured in popular museum exhibits even as he was commercializing them. “He understood publicity,” said McElheny.