Apple has added seven new 15-second Apple Watch commercials to the six unveiled earlier this month, and this round gets some extra star power from actress Chloë Sevigny, musician RZA and R&B singer Leon Bridges.
The spare set pieces are once again set in pastel dreamworlds. But make no mistake: The goal of these ads is to show how a powerful wearable like the Apple Watch can make your actual lived life easier and more convenient—and not coincidentally, make you a cooler person along the way.
With this series, Apple has just pivoted stylistically from the kind of real-world montages that have marked recent iPhone advertising—which the first spots for the Apple Watch had as well—back to the classic Apple approach of colorful, music-driven minimalism à la the iPod silhouettes.
The trick here is to weave product demos (which consumers still really need, to get an idea of why this product might be useful for them) right into the middle of scenes that naturally resist such overt product integrations. This is all balanced pretty skillfully, though.
And the spots—which show off the watch's native and third-party features like Siri integration (the Bridges spot), mobile payments, interchangeable bands (Sevigny), eBay bidding (RZA) and Uber calling—end up being a really groovy mix of image and utility work. (And by the way, they look pretty great on Instagram, too.)
Check out the rest of the new spots below.