Apple and advertising.

I'm in the Apple store on Fifth Avenue as I write this, the much vaunted Apple store, where the so-called geniuses-in-residence have had no success in repairing my MacBook Pro.

That said, there's a lot we in advertising can learn from how requests for service are handled by Apple. I think about this after having read the "Business Insider"a article about the 45-days it took one company to get a tweet created and posted. It's best to read the "Ad Contrarian's" post about it here.

Apple, as is their DNA, makes things simple.

You make an appointment.

You describe your problem.

They fix it.

You ok their fix.

And that's that.

In advertising, of course, things are way more complicated.

In fact, the person with the communication problem seldom ever gets to speak with the person arriving at the communication solution.

We further complicate things by a) not being able to articulate our problem and b) deciding to research what people think about all this.

It seems to me that using a regular mop, for instance, is difficult, messy and hard work. So, we show how simple Swiffer is in comparison.

You can add all kinds of bs to the process about the emotional rewards of clean linoleum corners, but all that doesn't really amount to a hill of beans.

So maybe ad agencies should be set up like the genius bar.

We get a problem.

We fix it.

If you want to go further, here's how we fix it according to the methodology used by Dave Trott.

That is, here's how we get impact.

Here's what we're communicating.

Here's how we're persuading.

Thank you very much.