I see all the backlash from people outraged, outraged! by the new iPad commercial, demanding and receiving an apology from Apple for making it. This article even says
Of course, to be fair, the ad is also meant to cause controversy, because you do not crush beautiful things and offend accidentally.
So do you think Apple planned for or expected “controversy” from this commercial, or were they blindsided by it? All I saw was a slightly clever commercial about squeezing all of those abilities into a very thin package (and playing off the popularity of hydrolic press videos on social media) and would never have realized I was supposed to be offended by it until told to be.
I don’t get the fuss at all. I can’t imagine Apple thought this ad would be controversial. Outrage culture is really reaching now.
And I have yet to see a person in the Apple ecosystem who will move out for any reason (I am sure there are some but most of them will stay no matter what Apple does…at least so far).
Sadly- you can get a not too expensive standing piano- likely out of tune- pretty much anytime for free. People dont want to move them. So, that was likely a junk piano.
These big campaigns are generally done using real objects. If there wasn’t a backlash there would probably be a making of video released for all the marketing magazines and for PR.
Apple have apologised:
I don’t think this is due to some sort of outrage culture at all. I think technology is threatening to reduce and replace parts of the creative industries and Apple has leaned into that in a rather clumsy way.
You see, ISTM it’s the “crushing” bit that’s coming across as tone-deaf.
I loves me some good hydraulic press vids as much as anyone else but part of the fun there is the “Hulk smash!!!” factor. The thing is being destroyed and we don’t mind.
Here we see the image of the material tools of conventional, physical-world, worked-by-human-hands, creative effort being destroyed , portrayed as a sort of transfiguration into this “new thing” (which is not that new anyway)
They could have instead kept feeding ever more, larger, heavier media forms into a container that could not possibly hold them, TARDIS-like, and then flattened that like it was made of hollow paper and kept folding and folding beyond realism … or who knows what, just find a way to show them being transfigured or metamorphosed into this new plane of existence, rather than crushed and destroyed.
No more cracked screens, the batteries are once again accessible and replaceable, and if leave my iPad on the surface of an industrial compressor capable of crushing various objects I am still all good to go?
Sometimes the “practical effects” are cheaper than CGI… and in this case, it would be a LOT more satisfying.
As the guy who made that decision a number of times at an ad agency, I can assure you that the number one question is “Will this ad introduce a new iPad?”
Second: “Will this ad get talked about?” ( )
And then: “What’s the most fun we can have shooting this?” (“Squishin’ shit, dude!”)
Which I always justified as “If we’re having fun making something, the public will have fun watching it.”
I guess the message I get from that commercial is that they claim to have condensed the functionality of all that stuff into an iPad.
The problem is, I don’t get the idea until the very end, after I’ve already seen them literally destroy everything. Now, I don’t mind that they’ve crushed a bunch of stuff, because it’s reasonable to assume they bought it with their own money and that was what they wanted to do with it. And it was attention getting and kinda cool to watch, in a way. Okayfine.
But still, to my way of thinking, the destruction undermines the message, if that was indeed the intended message.
And if you buy an iPad and think you’re gonna use it to become the next Dr. John, please don’t quit your day job.
I’m not offended by it but I find it vaguely unpleasant. By the end of it one can understand the message but my first, nanosecond gut reaction is Apple implying that technology is crushing human artistic endeavors and they’re leading the charge. That doesn’t seem ideal for a commercial but maybe I’m alone in my reaction.
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