I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue. They’re a luxury goods brand, their whole revenue model is based on the appearance of quality.

They're a premium brand, not a luxury brand. That's an important distinction.

Dell, HP, etc. all have premium products as well as their economy ones. Apple just doesn't do cheap and economy products.

When that gold plated Apple Watch came out, you could feel the discomfort. That's luxury brand territory.

Even the most expensive Apple Watch isn't in that "luxury" category anymore.

This happens in Apple News and it's really sad to see. All of the ads are terrible:

* junk hearing aids that appear to produce a strange glow in the users ear * lead generation ads with clickbait statements (looking right now at "Senior Drivers in Your State With No DUI Should Read This") * "Motley fool issues first-ever 9x buy alert" (wow first ever!) * "Little-known Roth conversion strategy allowed by IRS"

I've never intentionally clicked on an ad in Apple News.

This is a service I pay for and these ads are insulting.

How much revenue are they producing relative to my subscription fees? Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.

The people running subscription services within Apple may be measured on metrics (subscriber count/growth) that may not be aligned with the long-term interests of the company as a whole, especially since brand value and the effect of software advertising on hardware sales are hard to quantify.

I think for luxury brands advertising is even more important. Because they need to justify the inflated value of their brand.

Consider a Ferrari or a Rolex. It's not as much value for money as a cheap car or watch. There's some workmanship sure but most of the increased cost is just perceived value. People buy them because they are expensive, so they can show they have money. That only works if everyone knows it is expensive and the product has a good name.

Cheap stuff sells anyway because people need it and it is the best value for money.

Apple enlisted Hermes to try and convince watch people that they understand luxury. The leather wrist strap costs as much as a new Apple Watch. As another noted here, premium vs luxury can be quite a step.

> They’re a luxury goods brand

How so? Just about any major manufacturer has hardware in the same price range.

If it was random products, it might devalue the brand(or at least the app itself), but its clearly just advertising a more powerful product from apple for doing something similar, if you can't do what you want with the given app.

Why they do it? Probably whoever is leading the creator studio team has convinced their boss that they could pump up their numbers by putting this ad in...

>They’re a luxury goods brand,

Or maybe they aren't. They make great devices. I use them. I don't think of them as a luxury though.

They are in business to make money. Brand value and quality are far more nebulous as indicators of value than, say, "We got Brand X to pay us $Y for an ad campaign that will sit in Keynote for the next Z days and will book that revenue on the quarterly results".

The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.