Apple’s new iPad ad leaves the audience’s creative juices…flat

The horn is the first thing to be crushed. An industrial compactor then flattens a row of paint cans, ties up a piano, and flattens what appears to be a marble bust. In the final act of destruction, he takes the eyes out of a yellow ball-shaped emoji.

When the compressor rises, it reveals Apple’s latest goodies: the updated iPad Pro.

Apple CEO Tim Cook published the ad called “Crush” on Tuesday after the company held an event to announce the new tablets. “Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created,” Mr. Cook wrote. “Just imagine all the things it will be used to create.”

For decades, Apple has been the toast of the creative class. It captivated designers, musicians, and film editors with promises that its products would help them “think differently.”

But some creatives took a different message from the one-minute iPad ad. Instead of seeing a device that could help them create, as Mr. Cook suggested, they saw a metaphor for how big tech companies could profit from their work by crushing or co-opting technical tools that humanity has used for centuries.

The image was particularly troubling at a time when artists fear that generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry and create films, could take away their jobs.

“It’s extraordinary in its cruelty,” said Justin Ouellette, a software designer in Portland, Oregon, who does animation work and is a longtime Apple user. “A lot of people see this as a betrayal of her commitment to human creative expression and a deafness to the pressures these artists feel at this time.”

Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

It was the latest in a series of recent promotional missteps by a company widely considered a marketing juggernaut. that it Marketing the Apple Vision Pro device, which was released in January, struggled to help this device reach many customers. Last year, Apple was criticized for making a weird sketch of actors Octavia Spencer as Mother Earthdominated a company meeting about the company’s efforts to become carbon neutral by 2030.

Apple has been viewed as an advertising visionary since the 1980s. The “1984” Super Bowl ad introducing the Macintosh computer is among the most famous commercials of all time. The ad, developed by agency Chiat/Day, showed an actor throwing a sledgehammer through a screen displaying the face of a “Big Brother” character that was meant to be a metaphor for IBM.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after a 12-year stint, he sought to recapture its marketing magic. He and Lee Clow, the ad designer behind the “1984” trailer, developed together “Change your way of thinking” campaign. It paved the way for the popular “Get a Mac” sites, which include the Mac and PCand the original iPhone advertisementwhich showed people in classic movies and TV shows picking up the phone and saying “hello.”

Apple’s marketing has presented its products as easy to use. PCs and Android phones were described as devices for business managers working on spreadsheets, while Macs and iPhones were tools for film editors, photographers, and writers.

But Apple’s advertising has been uneven over the past ten years or so. He. She He clinched the 2012 campaign Which showcased the “geniuses” of the Apple Store on planes. Critics later dismissed a venue titled “Designed by Apple in California” as “helpless“.

In the wake of those missteps, Mr. Cook shifted oversight of advertising from Phil Schiller, the company’s longtime chief marketing officer, to Tore Mehren, the former president and creative director at Gray, the ad agency that created the small e-commerce company.

Under the leadership of Mr. Myhren, who joined in 2016, Apple has developed some of its ads with its own creative team and others in collaboration with an outside agency, Media Arts Lab. He was honored at the Cannes Lions Awards, the advertising industry’s leading event, for a spot on AirPods called “Bounce,” which showed a man jumping on a sidewalk while listening to music. Last year, Apple was named Creative Brand of the Year for its “RIP Leon” ad, in which a man sent an iPhone message saying a lizard in his care had died, then deleted it when the lizard suddenly flipped off its back.

Mr. Myhren and the Media Arts Lab did not respond to requests for comment about who was behind the “Crush” ad.

Michael J. Miraflor, chief brand officer at Hannah Gray, a venture capital firm, said on Channel

“It’s not boring or ordinary,” Mr. Miraflor books. “It makes me feel bad? Are you upset?”