The other night I decided to work on some home videos while watching TV. I launched iMovie on my Mac and on the Projects screen I saw something I'd never seen before: a banner ad, like the ones you see on this site. This ad was for Apple's Final Cut Pro.
I sat there for a while, watching the ad – I wasn't thinking about Apple's recommendation, I was thinking about the imposition of the ad. You know that feeling when someone is at your front door and you open it and immediately realize a pitch you don't want to hear is coming? This feeling.
Apple placing advertisements in its software is nothing new. The App Store has had them for years and the promotions appear before every Apple TV+ show and the TV app (not to mention the forced feeling of Apple product placement in its TV+ shows, but that's another topic). A recent report from Axios indicates that Apple has also started selling its own ads in Apple News.
Some may find the ads in these apps and services annoying, but these particular ads don't bother me much because the apps they appear in involve some type of commerce. I buy an app, a show, news and information, so offering me other products doesn't seem out of place.
The App Store has had ads for a while, but Apple seems to be taking advertising to another level.
Foundry
But an ad in iMovie? This is inappropriate. I understand Apple's reasoning: “Oh, hey, we noticed you use iMovie a lot, you can benefit from Final Cut Pro, a much more robust tool.” The ad is an attempt to be helpful to the user.
The difference is that iMovie's main purpose is to be a production tool and a free benefit to purchasing a Mac. When I fire up iMovie, Pages, GarageBand, or Photos, I'm in the mindset of doing something, tapping into the creative side of my brain, and using these tools to see what I can do. This ad is disruptive, imposing, and makes me uncomfortably lose my frame of mind. I didn't even know what to do with it. Should I click the X in the corner to close it, thus confirming to Apple that I saw the ad? Should I just ignore it and risk it appearing again? I ended up quitting iMovie and relaunching it (after taking the screenshot above) because I wanted to see if it would show up again. It didn't and still doesn't. So far.
Does this mean we'll soon see Logic Pro ads in GarageBand? (Maybe they're already there and I haven't encountered them yet.) A Final Cut Camera ad in the iPhone's Camera app? A Pixelmator ad in Photos? Maybe you, the reader, agree with this and find it useful, but what if this iMovie ad started promoting iCloud storage upgrades? Would you agree with that then?
Apple is always investing in new revenue streams and advertising is a big part of that push, so we'll continue to see them. This is fine as long as Apple is constantly thinking about the appropriateness of ad placement, unlike other big tech companies. Apple's success is built on the belief that user experience is the main priority, and it looks like that belief is going to be put to the test. Hopefully this will prevail.
