When Tor Myhren left Grey Advertising for Apple in early 2016, the move was greeted on Madison Avenue with the sort of bewilderment usually reserved for account executives who suddenly announce they are opening wineries in Oregon.
Chief creative officers, after all, do not typically decamp for the client side. They win awards, build reputations, and eventually get named to holding company positions with intentionally vague titles. They do not pack up for Cupertino to work inside a marketing operation that has been running more or less continuously since the Reagan administration.
But Mr. Myhren, who had spent nearly a decade transforming Grey from what one former colleague called "a Death Star of old-school advertising" into a Cannes-winning powerhouse, did exactly that. And now, a decade into his tenure as Apple's vice president of marketing communications, he is reflecting on what it means to steward a brand that does not require steering so much as careful maintenance.
"I stepped into a company that, from a marketing standpoint, has just been rock solid forever," Mr. Myhren said in a recent interview. "Which in some ways is a little intimidating."
The intimidation, apparently, has not prevented longevity. Under Mr. Myhren, Apple has continued its tradition of treating the product as protagonist — a philosophy he describes with the enthusiasm of someone who has internalized it completely. "So many brands will start with culture," he said. "We always start with the product."
This approach has produced work like "Shot on iPhone," which began as a billboard campaign in 2015 and has since evolved to include short films by Oscar-winning directors. (The directors, one suspects, do not complain about the equipment.)
Not everything has landed cleanly. Last year's "Crush" spot, which depicted creative tools being flattened by a hydraulic press, drew criticism for what some saw as an inadvertent metaphor for technology's relationship with human creativity. Mr. Myhren called the reaction "heartbreaking."
Perhaps most notable is what Apple does not do: market-test its advertising. "We make almost all of our decisions through gut instinct," Mr. Myhren said. "There's no book that says this is right or wrong."
It is a luxury afforded to very few brands, and one that Mr. Myhren, ever the agency creative, seems to appreciate. After all, the gut is considerably easier to trust when the company has been trusting it successfully since 1984.
Original story published in Fast Company: "Tor Myhren speaks! Apple's marketing man on a decade of shepherding the world's most sterling brand (exclusive)"