Crushed it! Did Apple miss the mark?
The weekend is finally here and at this point, the backlash felt by the new ad that Apple launched this week to promote the new iPad Pro is at full steam. Did they really miss the mark?
In a conversation with leadership at our ad agency the day after launch, one of our Principal Creative Directors, brought up what appeared to be the beginning of a tremendous backlash that the Apple iPad Pro ad was generating fueled by the amplification power of social media. He mentioned this under the context of the agency formalizing a new position to lead an area on ‘Cultural Fluency’ which precisely aims to monitor agency work that would risk generating this type of backlash and at least be educated enough about the possible consequences and be prepared for responses. As we were speaking, there was a growing group in the creative community outraged by the one-minute spot where that “gruesome hydraulic press” destroys a wide array of instruments and creative tools.
The irony is that it seemed the true artists and creators were certainly the most offended though most of them would agree that Apple has always championed and been an ally of individuals who are mostly driven by their left brain, those who truly “think different”. One could conclude that crushing creativity, much less creators was not what the brand intended.
It was fast and furious. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of comments on social media condemning the idea, tone, and notion of Apple disrespecting these icons and tools of creativity started dominating the conversations. Not surprisingly, conversations inside advertising agencies and marketers alike started to flow at rapid speeds. People started to reach out to ask what was our take on the ad. At the same time, we were reaching out to folks we respect to get their perspective. What will Apple do now?
By mid-day the day after, Apple had already issued an apology.
Amid all this turmoil, I could not help to try to see the perspective of not only the offended, but perhaps the ones that chose to take it more lightly. It certainly crossed my mind that the current sentiment in our industry and creator communities in the midst of technology acceleration and the appetite to be inclusive and diverse had something to do with the reaction of so many. It led me to believe that all that commitment and love that Apple has shown over the years to the creative community could crumble in seconds; and intent, of course, did not matter. When creators saw the ad, they could chose to see the ad as destructive or adopt the notion that all those instruments were lucky to be there because they made it and were considered for the ultimate compression a part of something new that aims to democratize those tools to all. The destruction interpretation took the day. I don’t blame them for reasons I will explain further down, but surely some of them saw the true intent of what Apple was trying to do. Surely they did. Right?
By Friday I woke up to this comment by Craig Elimeliah on Linkedin, a creative who’s had digital and technology in his DNA for years and even I only met him a couple of times I respect him from a distance. He seems to take the backlash as a good lesson on what the community is feeling regarding the role of technology in creation and the importance of human involvement. He also recognizes that the piece has certainly received its good share of awareness, which might be good. We’ll see.
But the comment I loved even more, and perhaps the one I identify with the most comes from Sir John Hegarty in which he suggests that “perhaps we should not take ourselves too seriously” and what I interpret as there should always be room for some humor. He does recognize the need to add some fun sound effects, but that I interpret as how the music selection by Sonny & Cher’s All I Need Is You in hindsight added fuel to the fire of feeling replaced or moved aside. Crushed.
Funny enough, his agency came up with the ad below 16 years ago. Coincidence? What is true is that perhaps several things might explain why the Apple ad is getting crushed on social media. (and that it is hard to come up with something completely new)
The first one is the sentiment that LLM (Large Language Models) and Gen AI tools have finally become. An eye-opener and, to some, a threat impossible to ignore, and some have adopted the narrative of perhaps being eliminated.
Get Francisco Cardenas’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Secondly, the state of tech today. With social media being so readily available to amplify our thoughts the rise of 5G which allows video anywhere helped escalate this quickly. A megaphone for all.
And lastly the world mood today, the sentiment that knowing all of what is happening in any corner of the world gives us we can be less happy if we choose to as we can feed into our news menu, anything we ultimately want.
I have to admit I was disappointed by the reaction the ad got. I thought it was beautiful and it reminded me of work like the Sony commercial that throws balls into the street with Jose Gonzalez playing in the background to deliver on the color of their Bravia TV.
I also read an author who compared it to the reputable Honda commercial that has that chain reaction and viewers followed almost in trance just to fin out in the end how great it is when things just work.
It also made me think of the 2016 art installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu where a robot is trying to help itself by pushing oil into itself with a mechanical arm to keep functioning. It ran for three years until it finally succumbed to its demise
That creativity was larger than life. Creative that you would love to see but you would never do because of how complex (and expensive) it is to create in real life. At the end, it also made me think of the law of conservation of mass as I chose to see the ad not so much from the angle of destruction but transformation: “Mass is neither created nor destroyed, but simply transformed”. Maybe too deep, but I think that was the intent. As my good friend and creative friend Guillermo Tragant said, it did not affect you as much, because you are not an artist. I am certainly not, but as a consumer of art and someone who has seen its good share of ads I can still say with confidence that Apple crushed it. How you interpret that, is up to you, the reader.
Update May 16th, 2024.
Clever Samsung response?
