Apple’s Tale: The Engagement and Sense-Making of Apple’s Story-Based Advertisements

Abstract

This study aims to examine the storytelling of Apple’s three story-based advertisements, namely Share Your Gift, Real Stories and Welcome Home. It is discovered that the three advertisements position Apple products as the heroes of the stories, contain dramatic or exaggerated events and narrate a universal problem known by the majority of the society. These points then contribute to the three advertisements’ narrative probability and fidelity introduced in Walter Fisher’s (1985b) narrative paradigm. After the analysis, it is found that all the three of Apple’s story-based advertisements discussed in this study contain adequate narrative probability and fidelity, making Apple’s selling message in these advertisements believable.