WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
ESSAY — 13 MAY 2024 —
ESSAY — 13 MAY 2024 —
It’s a stroke of dark comedy when a real company stumbles into the territory of a “Fictional Evil Corporation in a B-Grade Science Fiction” and makes a strategic decision so utterly on the nose it would be considered bad storytelling if you had found it in a novel or movie. Apple is this week’s winner for managing this particular feat. Packaging up their disdain for their foremost customer base, professional creatives, into a one-minute video advertisement to announce the release of the newest iPad Pro. To add an annoying little boop to the nose this ad sits on, they named it “Crush!”
Screen Grab — “Crush” Apple 2024
The direction? Comparing the new iPad Pro to thousands of dollars worth of creative tools by arranging them underneath an industrial-scale hydraulic press and hitting the big green button. As the press flattens everything, it’s revealed that only the iPad Pro has survived the crushing due to its ultra-thin design. Thus proving that the original tools are... much too thick? Of course, this ad is not just a run-of-the-mill thickness comparison. While it boasts the achievements of “skinny tech” in the single line of voiceover in the ad and Tim Cook's announcement on X/Twitter, the ad is meant to be read as a symbolic combining of every aspect of creativity into one beautifully packaged product. It is a strange way to convey this concept - hydraulic presses are famously known for their singular functional purpose of creating new objects. Hundreds of hours of hydraulic press content haven’t solidified our understanding of how they work at all. Apple combined two completely different messages into one confusing stunt. Before anything else, it’s just a bad concept.
It took a single minute of footage to undermine the work of every creative industry that uses Apple products in day-to-day operations. No industry is safe; music, photography, gaming, design, art. You name it, Apple put it in the crusher. It feels strikingly akin to the Torment Nexus⁽⁴⁾ from the Classic Sci-fi novel “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.” Where the symbols of human nature are sacrificed for corporate greed and the state of humanity is irreparably broken forever.
The practical element of this is disturbing as well; it's one thing to conceptually destroy thousands of dollars worth of high-end equipment in the name of One Product to Rule Them All. It’s another to actually destroy real objects in camera. While it’s not the end of the world that a few new things are broken on purpose, consumers are constantly hit with messaging from corporate giants about their personal contribution to waste in the age of the global climate emergency. The overall execution feels unjustifiably wasteful and a touch hypocritical. This compressor concept isn’t even an original idea from Apple, with LG beating them to the punchline in 2008. LG conveys an inherently different sentiment in close ups and voice over. It’s not as brazen in the depiction of destruction. Other ads that have opted for larger-than-life practical effect stunts have taken a much more positive route with their messaging. Celebrating imagination brought to life and the power of creativity with an unlimited commercial budget. Apple may as well have just set theirs on fire.
The iconic Pixar lamp is crushed with other creative objects.
Apple snuck in a stab at other creative institutions as well, namely Pixar, by placing the iconic lamp (above) among the doomed creative tools. AirBnb only last week pulled off a delightful stunt collaboration with Pixar by recreating the balloon house from Up. 8000 balloons and a crane later, AirBnb is back in people's mouths and nobody is complaining about the waste. Compare “Crush” to Sony’s 50,000 bouncy ball commercial from 2005, renowned as one of the greatest advertisements ever made. Despite the inherent waste in all of these, it's forgivable when used to create something of inherent artistic value. Destruction for destruction's sake doesn’t make the cut. Apple is punching down and viewers are left with a bruised eye.
AirBnb x Pixar Up House, 2024
Sony Bravia “Balls” Commercial, 2005
The current landscape of big tech coming to replace everything with AI and squeeze pennies out of consumers with dark pattern subscription packages and prohibitive paywalls is dire. As job security becomes more volatile, negotiating the role of technology in professional creative work is a delicate operation. Creative industries are already weary from the first wave of AI that saw the introduction of products like ChatGPT and MidJourney. The second wave is approaching at warp speed as SaaS and Tech companies integrate AI products into their offerings. In a meme-style post to X/Twitter last week - complete with “shy finger” emojis to keep their communication style harmless and innocent - Adobe introduced more generative AI tools for Photoshop. This announcement received massive backlash from working creatives already struggling to afford the cost of Adobe products. In consumer spaces, Spotify quietly put a limit on viewing lyrics on a free plan, discovered by very disgruntled users last week. Physical media ownership is critical as streaming services become notorious for disabling password sharing, canceling successful shows, and making older content inaccessible. Wherever consumers turn there’s a toll stop with a credit card input, and nobody can afford all of it.
Adobe announces AI Text to Image for Photoshop on X/Twitter, 2024
Screengrab from a free user of Spotify, 2024
While "Shock Factor" worked in previous eras of advertising, it was ultimately due to a shock-style commercial being the only piece of upsetting or offensive media a given audience would see in a day. In contemporary use, it's becoming redundant and approaching unethical as consumers are overexposed without break to harrowing global events and the harsh realities of late-stage capitalism on their smartphones. Three shots stand out for their emblematic violence in this minute of creative crushing. The traditional wooden artist's mannequin positioned in defensive terror, the childlike character on the television looking up in anguish as the press comes down upon them, and the emoji ball’s eyes popping out of its head. These moments feel excruciatingly tone-deaf when placed in the same digital spaces where widely accessible footage of Palestinian civilians explicitly crushed to death by relentless bombardment from the State of Israel. Please research this at your own discretion. The average consumer today has no separation between news, content and advertising. The cultural context and landscape in which media and advertisements are shared must be examined against the media itself. This commercial doesn’t exist in a vacuum and wasn't made in a day. Did nobody from Apple's PR department think maybe it’s not a good time to release a commercial about crushing things to their symbolic demise? This sort of critical thinking should be 101 for a company as big as Apple.
Artists Mannequin, Childlike Figure and Emoji ball are positioned as personified symbols of creativity.
Apple's massive size means layers of marketing and advertising teams were involved in the development, approval, production, and publishing of this ad. It's a direct reflection of the values of the company as a whole that they are willing to position themselves, and their products, as destructive replacements to the instruments of creative practice. This ad isn't a mistake, it's a statement. Apple’s vision for the future rejects creatives who use traditional tools and refuses to acknowledge Apple products as extensions of creative work. This ad could have been a brilliant opportunity to tell the story of the collaboration between Apple products and the creatives that use it: objects from each industry being improved and enhanced by the power of the new iPad Pro. Or if they wanted to drive home the selling point of Just How Skinny Technology Can Be, they could have just crushed older versions of the iPad to prove how razor-thin the new one is.
They didn’t do either of those things, and their message to us is clear. Get crushed.
Note - Apple has since apologised for the ad and pulled it from air.
