Apple crushes creative tools (and spirits) with latest iPad Pro ad

Three days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted a new ad for the iPad Pro with the caption "imagine all the things it’ll be used to create". Except the ad itself was a demonstration of the literal opposite of creation.

The video, over a minute long, was a harrowing depiction of a set of creative tools - from musical instruments to cans of paint to cameras- being crushed by a gigantic hydraulic press that slowly descends from the ceiling. The idea being: you can do everything those instruments can do with just the iPad Pro. Honestly, it looked like a spoof ad for a dystopian future within a Black Mirror episode. The ad immediately faced backlash, even prompting an apology from Apple earlier today. But where did they go wrong, exactly?

Actor Hugh Grant was not pleased with Apple's latest ad.

First, a re-enactment of (presumably) actual events.

Like detectives on any self-respecting TV show, let's establish the timeline shall we? First, Apple presumably briefed an advertisement agency (or their in-house creative team) that they wanted to show the world how the iPad Pro can do so much more than what people use iPads for today (i.e. shutting toddlers the f*ck up when the adults have more important things to do). Fair enough. Let's also assume that the creative team -as with every brief- was told by the client that they want something different, innovative, disruptive, clutter-breaking, et cetera et cetera.

The agency goes ahead and puts their best minds to work. The work is for Apple, after all. Interns won't do. So these geniuses, with a clear brief in hand and Cannes on their minds, set about reference-hunting, brain-storming, mood-boarding, script-writing, deck-making, basically doing all sorts of advertising-y things, to quickly get back to Apple with -presumably- more than one idea for the ad. Somebody at Apple decided that yes, this one, this ad with a literal machine smashing the life out of artists' tools that have for centuries and centuries helped humanity to interpret and express and experience the human condition... this is it!

This, agreed the Apple marketing team unanimously, is exactly the message we want to deliver to people at a time when their savings are being depleted every second by tanking economies. A time when new AI tools are launched almost on a daily basis not to solve for the terrible inaccessibility of health care or to enhance workplace safety for dangerous professions like mining or electrical maintenance, but to "generate" video and images from text, to "create" written content with a few prompts, to "compose" music in 200-odd genres with one command. A time when our feeds have been inundated with clips of tanks and drones and governments doing to people -in Ukraine, and Gaza, and India, and the list goes on- pretty much the same thing that hydraulic press does to those musical instruments in Apple's latest iPad Pro ad.

Did Apple not show the advertisement to test audiences? Seems unlikely that they did (although Test Audiences are about as good an idea as the American jury system). So the Marketing team sells the Idea to the Management, and Mr. Tim Cook goes ahead and launches the ad on his Twitter. And all hell breaks loose.

The Fallout

What's telling about the reaction to the ad is that it's not just the "creative" professionals who took umbrage. Watching the Big Bad Machine juicing creative instruments to a pulp evoked a reaction in all of us- in both creators and consumers of art. Because even the most cynical among us have turned to art for comfort. Because even the least "artsy" among has a song or a painting or a book or a photograph that binds us eternally with a person or a moment in time. It's the ethereal nature of that connection -of needing and longing and belonging- that Apple stamped out over the course of the iPad Pro ad and showed us exactly what human connections are instead: mortal. And it sucked.

The ad itself is not telling us anything new, or even presenting to us a new idea. "Ditch your primitive, multiple tools, for our shiny new tech" is an advertising idea that has been used -successfully- for as long as advertising has existed. The target audience of a commercial disposing off their old tools in favour of the new tech the commercial is shilling is also not new. It has previously been done less graphically perhaps, but it has been done. The reason the iPad Pro ad affected so many people the way it did has less to do with its idea, and everything to do with its execution... and timing. Thanks to social media, we are living through a time when people across the world are united in paranoia that the world as they know it is changing so quickly as to render them obsolete, a time when many artists fear that technology is cutting the ground from beneath their feet. Maybe don't tell them that the sky is also (quite literally) about to fall on their heads.

And what's truly incredible about all of this is that Apple got it so wrong, because they have got it right -and they have been a huge enabler of artists, in all the right ways- for so long. You will not find graphic designers or film makers burning their Macs or boycotting the iPhone because of a marketing gamble gone wrong (unlike in the case of Nike or Bud Light) simply because Apple, more than any other corporation in our lifetimes, has democratized creativity in a way that none of us could have imagined twenty years ago.

The Verdict

As far as the advertisement itself is concerned, it's inarguable that the ad communicated in no uncertain times exactly what it set out to. No competitor is going to be able to create even half the impact for a product twice as good simply because Apple both went way over the line and effectively boxed all future competitor messaging into the farthest, tamest, least interesting corner on the safe side of the line. But at what cost, Apple, at what cost?

The irony of course is that artists have been organically using Apple products to increase efficiency, reduce costs and enhance the output of their creative endeavours for so many years now. Chances are they will continue doing the same, perhaps now with the iPad Pro 13 in hand.

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