Apple has apologised for an ad for the iPad Pro that sparked an online backlash and was pulled from TV within 48 hours.
The ad showed an industrial press crushing a variety of artistic tools including a trumpet, a typewriter and cans of paint, before lifting again to reveal Apple’s “thinnest ever product”, with a soundtrack of Sonny and Cher’s All I Ever Need is You. Critics described it as a perfect metaphor for the AI-driven replacement of human creativity. Apple admits it “missed the mark”.
So what? There’s tone-deaf – and there’s selective hearing. It’s not clear which is to blame for Apple’s marketing misfire. Was it courting controversy? Or is it so siloed in its Cupertino walled garden that it’s oblivious to fears about AI and nostalgia for real life?
“The real error Apple have made is apologising for it,” says Nils Leonard, founder of the Uncommon ad agency. “This ad isn’t for me that offensive, or even that original – it’s an early 2000s metaphor done with an impressive Apple-level of scale… If one of the biggest brands in the world puts out some entertainment that offends or entices in equal measure, that’s fine. The bigger crime would be indifference.”
Others are less sympathetic. On X, the actor Hugh Grant called it “the destruction of human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley”. Meredith Whittaker, CEO of Signal, tweeted: “it’s notable that even Apple, paragon of brand creation and maintenance, is so out of touch with this moment. It’s not 2015… no one trusts big tech.”
To be clear: one bad ad is unlikely to take a bite out of Apple’s
- $2.9 trillion valuation,
- its position at the top of brand consultancy rankings, or even
- sales figures for the super-thin “Ozempic iPad”.
But investors are still asking what happened to the soul of the company once known as a friend of creatives? Did it leave the building with Steve Jobs and Jony Ive?
1984, again. “Crush” isn’t the only Apple ad to have received a mixed reception. During the 1984 Super Bowl, under the leadership of Jobs, Apple launched the Macintosh with a commercial directed by Ridley Scott.
It depicted an Orwellian world of men in grey marching towards an image of Big Brother. A woman wearing orange shorts and carrying a sledgehammer sprints through the crowd before hurling it at the screen and smashing it to pieces. A tagline heralding the new computer reads: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’”.
“Crush” seems to push the inverse message.
Silicon Silo? An external agency might have advised against, but the idea of crushing creativity sailed through with Apple’s in-house team. It was greenlit by CEO Tim Cook, who tweeted the ad, praising “the incredible power of the M4 chip” – a feature which enables AI functions like identifying specific objects in video.
“The tech giants are desperately looking for an edge in AI, and to prove to customers – as well as shareholders and the stock market – that they are AI leaders,” says an executive with knowledge of the company. “The ad itself suggests people are getting carried away by that… it speaks to the internal messaging within Apple.”
Mid-life crisis? There are a number of reasons Apple’s executives may be feeling out of sorts.
- iPhone sales dropped 10 per cent in the first three months of this year, while overall sales dropped in almost every market including China.
- OpenAI released its new model GPT-4o this week. Apple is reportedly nearing a deal with the developer to include some form of AI assistant in its products, but that means embedding another company’s tech and is tacit acceptance that Apple’s own AI development isn’t up to scratch.
It’s not hard to see the ad as an unsubtle pointer to a new piece of messaging: that Apple is now aggressively AI. But proof is in the product, and all eyes are now on next month’s World Wide Developer conference to see if it pulls something shiny out of the bag.
Whatever steps it takes in AI won’t shake a general feeling among consumers that Apple has crossed a set of battle lines it drew in 1984, says Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy; no longer an upstart, but a tech monolith pushing down on our lives. Don’t expect it to be too honest about that in future.
