Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/09/disturbing-apple-ad-shows-human-creativity-crushed-into-perfect-5-3mm-thin-shape.html
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Hydraulic presses are cool.
Musical instruments, art supplies, toys, cameras, and books are cool.
This ad is not cool.
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If the intent was to suggest that the machine enables all those things while being ultra-portable, this Apple ad did not quite get there.
Definitely “a swing and a miss”. To try and achieve what was presumably the original intention, they could have easily shown all of the creativity being pushing into an iPad. What they effectively did was showing all of that stuff being destroyed and trying to capture on the popularity of YT videos like from the HydraulicPressChannel.
Now it reads as “after all of your creative endeavors are crushed, all that’s left is an Apple product”. womp womp!
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oh my god that ad was horrible. Pained me at a visceral level.
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It’s curious because Apple very commonly does ads with implied replacement of less-cool things by glorious instruments of Apple’s services revenue story; it’s not like the “what’s a computer?” kid was there to indicate a commitment to coexistence between ipads and beige wintel towers; but it’s always by implication: just cool people doing whatever cool thing on Apple widget with whatever lame legacy thing has been totally obviated simply not included.
This seems to be animated by the same general sentiment that cool Apple thing can do much that replaces other stuff; but it’s an inversion of the usual ad formula: 95% crush video and then a handful of seconds of the edge of an ipad at the last second.
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that’s one hot take, i agree.
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Oof. They should fire the AI that generated that ad.
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They’ve come a long way from that 1984 ad, eh… I mean, Apple being the liberator of mankind from boring, oppressive IBM was always kind of BS, but I think this really just… shows us what they’ve always been about.
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But if the intent was probably to get people’s attention and get them talking about the product, it has evidently succeeded well beyond a lot of recent tech ads.
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Here’s a better version.
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Is that an accomplishment though? Imagine an ad that shows an adorable piglet. Then we see it led into a guillotine. Cut to a blade coming down, and we hear a pitiful squeal as the camera is spattered with blood. Finally it drips down the lens to reveal…the new iPad Pro. I’m sure we’d be talking about that too, so does that make me a marketing genius?
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I wonder if that’s what whoever had the concept thought, originally. Execution, not so good.
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Crush all real creativity into non-existence; that’s a helluva sales pitch.
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I guess the point was you could fit (cram) all this entertainment and creative tools into a flat iPad. But it just comes off as… negative. You’re destroying all of these traditional tools and entertainment for the iPad?
It falls flat, IMO.
It doesn’t quite work in reverse - but - the concept works better! If they started with the iPad and then everything came pouring out it, the creativity and entertainment literally spilling out of it to make a mountain, that I find a better idea.
Note - I will watch the hydraulic press channel on occasion, but that is a whole different vibe.
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I guess it could work if you did the whole thing as an obvious animation, so all the stuff there gets flattened, not crushed, and the whole flat sheet then folds or collapses into the iPhone.
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Which is what the creative agency did. This is just another example, in a long line, of (pisspoor) creatives grabbing an existing popular theme and corrupting it for their own ends and scoring an own goal.
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What a waste of a good arcade console, piano, and a whole bunch of other stuff!
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Stop; you’re being too creative.
Yes, that was @Murgatroyd’s exact point; so glad you groked it.
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Maybe they’ve had a recent shift in marketing strategy, but Apple has always struck me as a very image conscious company that steers away from controversy, so I have doubts this was intentional.
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New iPad intro, 2027:
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