Last week, when people from the advertising industry began to dump on Apple’s new iPad advertisement on LinkedIn, I wondered what the fuss was about. Turns out that people working in creative industries don’t like it when the richest company on earth wantonly flattens guitars, books, collectibles, and other art objects.
If you haven’t seen the spot, here it is.
“Crush!” is far from a surprising take from the company that shrunk our record collections into nothingness, and conjoined our phones with our cameras. So why did Apple’s vice president of marketing communications, Tor Myhren, feel the need to apologize? Also, who was he apologizing to, the critics of the ads, or Apple shareholders?
Ryan O’Connell, Chief Strategy Officer & Founder of jnr. in Australia wrote an op-ed for Ad News wherein he argues that apologizing for the Apple iPad ad was a mistake.
The ad may not be your cup of tea, and perhaps even upset you, and that’s OK. Creative will forever be subjective, and no campaign in the history of humankind has experienced universal love.
Yet this one’s not even remotely worthy of saying sorry for.
What does merit an apology is the avalanche of boring, uninteresting, ineffective, wallpaper, that is so lacking in creativity that that no one even notices it, let alone talks about it. Such work is an unfathomable waste of time, money, effort and talent.
Ha! He is correct. The industry as a whole owes clients and their customers a thousand apologies for making pointless drab filler instead of advertising that moves people. And Apple may owe some apologies too…for stripping the earth of precious metals, for questionable labor practices at offshore factories, and for using more than its fair share of power to run data centers.
Samsung Claps Back
In an interesting twist, Samsung—which has its own Galaxy Tab S9 Series tablet to promote—is also critical of Apple’s new ad.
“Creativity cannot be crushed,” the tagline for the new Samsung spot reads.
Directed by filmmaker Zen Pace, the spot from advertising agency BBH USA “celebrates a fundamental truth: creativity comes from within, and it’s something that technology cannot take away from us,” the ad agency said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch.
