Luxury platforms advertise their customers
99% of businesses in the world sell themselves. And they invent newer and newer ways to do it.
The automobile industry is a great example. In 1898, the Winton Motor Carriage company printed, what is widely recognized as the first US commercial ad, in the Scientific American a pitch for Americans to “Dispense with the horse.” A decade later, Ford pioneered lifestyle advertising pitching their “Universal Car”. And by the 50s, Chevy pulled on your patriotic heartstrings: “See the USA in your Chevrolet.” Most recently, every brand has tried to use rapid cuts in TV ads to prove they are safer than others. But, all these ads share one thing: they pitch the product of the business.
Luxury consumer products don’t do that. They want you to buy into a lifestyle, not a material possession. There is no better example of this than Rolex:
Rolex isn’t pitching you that their watch will make you change the world. They’re pitching you that the people who change the world wear them. In other words, “Do you think you are in the same class of people who run the world? If so, we’ve got the watch for you.”
Why am I talking about luxury consumer advertising? Because I think it has a very clear blueprint for how technology platforms should be advertising.
Technology platforms are ultimately intermediaries that offer the power of their infrastructure to businesses that actually serve consumers. They don’t need to sell what they have; they need to sell what you can do for it. Apple, potentially the greatest creative company of all time, launched the iPhone 3G with this pitch in a 30 second ad: “There’s an app for that.”
At face value, it looks like a message to consumers: no matter what you need, you can do it with your new iPhone. But, I don’t think that’s what they cared about. One day before the iPhone 3G launched, Apple launched the App Store. A new platform for a new computing paradigm. That add was directed at developers.
The ad showed apps on the homescreen from Yelp, Bank of America, Google, eBay, and The New York Times. They were trying to tell developers: “The brands you respect build on our platform so trust us, you should too.”
What about in B2B? One of my favorite ad series ever is as good of an example of this as any. AWS is fundamentally an infrastructure platform selling to developers and IT teams. They could create ads for S3 and EC2 and so on, and they do. But that isn’t impactful. In 2019, AWS debuted a couple ads that they called "Curiosity Kid” but I remember as “AWS is how”.
The ad shows a girl going about her day seeing incredible (at the time) tech-driven experiences: Lyft routing a car, Dunkin’ Donuts knowing her order, and Snapchat filters dynamically changing her face. The girl repeatedly asks how each of these businesses make that happen. The end of the ad shows her how:
AWS is not selling compute or storage in that ad; they are showcasing what their highly recognizable base of customers do with their platform. They, like Apple a decade earlier, were trying to tell developers: “The brands you respect build on our platform so trust us, you should too.”
I think this is more relevant than ever as luxury prosumer brands are becoming commodity products increasingly competing on their brands and trust. When they go to market trying to pitch themselves, it’s worth remembering that the best way to pitch themselves is to pitch their customers.
P.S. Why do I call these brands luxury? As Ben and David mention in their incredible LVMH episode of Acquired: “Premium is pay for value. It might be paying a lot for value, but you're paying for value. Luxury is literally paying because something offers no more value, and other people will know that so they know that: (1) you have the wealth to spend on things, even though they are no more utilitarian to you, and (2) you have taste.” These prosumer brands do not have a product value edge; they are luxury not premium.