TV Ad Spend Weekly: Apple AirPods bring people together in new holiday ad
Brands continue to invest heavily in above-the-line content, and television is still seen as the place brands want to be. Each week, in partnership with Kantar Media, The Drum looks at which brands have been investing the most on newly-launched creative on US national broadcast and cable TV.
Apple led new creative ad spend for the week ending November 26th
Spend on new ad placements on national TV reached $173 million during the week of November 20. Despite being the lead in for the Black Friday shopping weekend, spend saw a small decrease of 13 percent compared to the previous week. Apple was the top spending advertiser for the second week in a row, spending one-third of its total TV budget for the week on new creative.
All of the brands with top spend the week ending November 26th placed a majority of their spends on new creative in NFL programming. Rounding out this week’s top 5 were Microsoft touting Windows 10 PCs, Home Depot making “the magic happen” for the holidays and Target and Walmart gearing up for Cyber Monday.
This week’s big spender, Apple, wants to be on consumers’ holiday lists, and if you aren’t buying anyone a new phone this season, perhaps you can be swayed to purchase a pair of AirPods. That is the intent with Apple’s new ad, which was released nationally on Black Friday.
The commercial shows a girl in a snow-filled setting listening to her AirPods as she dances down the street. She bumps into a man and puts one of her AirPods in his ear, showing off the feature that the wireless headphones can be shared. The couple then begins to dance through the streets together for the remainder of the ad which is set to Sam Smith’s song, Palace.
To date, the commercial has aired nationally 18 times, with the majority of spend (64%) having been placed during NFL games.
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This data is part of ongoing reporting released on a weekly basis with Kantar Media's using their AdScope tool.