Galloway and Swisher give props to Apple PR

“Apple has done a great job of finding the soft tissue of Facebook and Amazon and really squeezing on it.”

In this week’s episode of Pivot, Recode’s Kara Swisher and NYU’s Scott Galloway marvel at how deftly Apple handled its Austin rollout.

Swisher: They did it quietly. They’re sort of the anti-Amazon version of this. What do you think?

Galloway: They’re doing it quietly loudly. Right? Apple is the PR genius of 2018. They say OK, privacy is a big issue, people are angry, let’s run with this privacy thing and send Tim on an indignance tour.

And now the new one is we’re opening a new office and we’re not going to gamify it. We’re not asking for anything.

Apple has done a great job of finding the soft tissue of Facebook and Amazon and really squeezing on it. It’s smart. Brilliant.

Facebook has 600 PR agents. They have been schooled and taken behind the gym and had their asses kicked by the people on communications at Apple.

Swisher: That’s Steve Dowling. Let me call him out. And also Tim. They also handled the Bloomberg thing around the chip. They’ve been aggressive and nonaggressive at the same time. It’s a very interesting strategy, in terms of how they respond. Sort of like adults might.

Obviously everything has to focus on what they make. But they are doing a beautiful job avoiding the bad tech-lash.

Galloway: That is one of the bigger themes that won’t be reported on about 2018. It’s that Apple, at the beginning of the year, was grouped into this thing called Big Tech. And they have consciously uncoupled from the rest of Big Tech. People are no longer talking about them being bad. They’ve starched their hat white. Unfortunately they don’t have the recurring revenue streams of some of these other companies. They’re no longer the most valuable company in the world.

I want to flip back to Google…

My take: I enjoy watching two of the sharpest knives in tech carve things up. As long as it’s not me they’re slicing.