Every time someone browses the internet on a non-Apple device, data trackers follow silently across sites, building a profile, feeding ad networks, and running entirely without consent or visibility. Apple has been making this argument since 2019. For the latest chapter, TBWA Media Arts Lab made the invisible visible in the most literal way possible.
The Film
Clingers launched globally on June 3, 2026, directed by Ivan Zacharias through production company Smuggler. The hero film shows a group of figures dressed head to toe in chrome-coloured tracksuits physically latching onto people as they browse the internet on their phones. They follow non-Apple users everywhere, clinging to their backs, peering over their shoulders, hovering in doorways, turning up in every room and every situation with the cheerful obsessiveness of something that does not understand it is unwanted.
When a woman switches to Safari, the clingers explode into smithereens.
The visual language is deliberately absurdist. The discomfort of being followed and observed is real, but the chrome-suited figures make it strange rather than threatening, accessible rather than paranoid. The campaign does not want to frighten its audience. It wants to make them feel slightly ridiculous for not having noticed sooner.
The Second Execution: Tracker Invasion
Alongside the broadcast film, Apple and TBWA Media Arts Lab built a companion digital execution called “Tracker Invasion” designed to function inside the online environment it is commenting on. The clingers appear within actual digital media units across websites, watching users browse from inside the ad units themselves, before Safari blocks them into oblivion. The execution turns the media buy into the demonstration. The tracker is visible in the advertising space where trackers actually operate. The format is the proof.
The Technical Features Behind the Campaign
The campaign sits on top of specific Safari features that Apple has been developing and refining over years. Intelligent Tracking Prevention uses on-device machine learning to block cross-site tracking while allowing websites to function normally. Fingerprint Defence presents a simplified version of the device’s system configuration to trackers, so more devices look identical and individual users become harder to single out. Link Tracking Protection prevents tracking parameters embedded in URLs from following users across sites. Private Browsing can be locked behind Face or Touch authentication. All features are turned on by default. No settings change required.
The point Apple is making through the campaign is not only that Safari has these features. It is that rival browsers do not, or do not make them the default. The fictional Android device featured in the film is the implicit comparison. The clingers only appear on non-Apple hardware. When Safari is present, they are gone.
The Platform It Extends
Clingers is the latest execution in Apple’s “Privacy. That’s iPhone” platform, which began as a single billboard at CES in 2019. In seven years, the platform has produced Tracked, Waiting Room, and Flock, each using a different creative metaphor to make the same structural argument: the data economy is built on extracting information from people who are not aware it is happening, and Apple’s products are built to stop it.
The consistency of the platform across seven years and multiple campaigns is itself a brand argument. Apple has not shifted the message or refreshed the position. The creative treatment changes. The conviction behind it does not.
The campaign runs across broadcast, OOH, digital display, social, cinema, YouTube, and Apple.com globally.
Campaign Name: Clingers / “Privacy. That’s iPhone”
Agency Name: TBWA Media Arts Lab / Director: Ivan Zacharias / Production: Smuggler / Post-production: House of Parliament and Trafik / Editing: Work Editorial
Brand Name: Apple / Safari
Location: Global (launched United States, June 3, 2026)
