Apple's Tone-Deaf Disaster

The controversial iPad ad that sparked global backlash against the tech giant

May 14, 2024

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Podcast version of this stack here👇

Hi!

A few days ago, Apple released their latest ad called “Crush!” for their newest iPad. This triggered quite a backlash instantly. Apple's "Crush!" ad depicted a shocking scene of creative and cultural destruction. One by one, objects representing art, music, literature, and more were mercilessly compacted by an industrial press.

Watch it here:

A vintage TV, record player, and arcade game machine were flattened. Beloved instruments like a piano, trumpet, and guitar were crushed into unrecognizable heaps. Books, paintbrushes, cameras, and a classic typewriter - iconic symbols of human expression - were pulverized without a second thought. As the jarring visuals played out, the ad seemed to gleefully demolish items holding deep cultural significance to many viewers around the world. At the end of the spot, the new iPad Pro pops out, shiny and new, with a voiceover that says, “The most powerful iPad is also the thinnest.”

Interestingly, Ad Age says the ad was produced in-house by Apple, rather than by an outside agency.

The controversy

Controversy #1

There was some allegation that this ad was very close to an LG ad released in 2008 for the LG Renoir. This is basically the same concept, except the crushed props now look very dated.

Controversy #2

The Apple ad didn’t go over well with creators. While the ad was meant to be a metaphor about compressing all the tools you use to create in real life into one tool, creators felt that it was disrespectful and was an accurate representation of how technology was suppressing creativity.

I think this fear comes from two places:

younger generations feel more empowered than before to say what they feel;
taking into consideration the recent rise of AI also has been causing great fear about the future of the job market. Here is a podcast episode I did about the topic:

From a creative standpoint, I personally think the ad is good. When I first watched it, I was not aware of the controversy, and it did not shock me. I understood the metaphor of the digitalization of these tools and games instantly and thought it was combining nicely the metaphor with one of the top trending type videos online (that people could relate to), which is videos of various objects being crushed by a hydraulic press.

Following that trend, a sub-trend appeared where dancers replicated the randomness of the press which also turned viral. It seemed Apple wanted to take this trend to the extreme while adapting it to support its USP.

Emotional viewer testing

Andrew Tindal from System1 tested Apple's controversial iPad Pro ad with both existing Apple owners and non-owners. The results starkly highlight the importance of pre-testing ads with real consumers beyond just your current customer base. Watch the video and read his full analysis here on LinkedIn, it is pretty mindblowing.

For Apple owners, the ad scored in the top 2% for long-term creative effectiveness by evoking strong positive emotions (39% happiness, 8% negative). But for non-owners, it scored the lowest possible rating, eliciting intense negative emotions (14% happiness, 23% negative).

This demonstrates that while the ad resonates with Apple's existing customers, it completely misses the mark for potential new customers - likely harming brand growth. Pre-testing only with your current customers leads to blind spots from not understanding how the broader consumer market perceives your advertising.

🚨 New podcast episode available!🚨

A fascinating discussion with digital strategist Charlie Ferguson about brands, marketing, and the future of the metaverse went live this morning on my podcast. I learned a bunch. Check it out here (putting Spotify link here, but avail everywhere) 👇

The key takeaways are: 1) Emotions are critical for understanding ad effectiveness. 2) Testing only with current customers ignores opportunities for brand penetration. 3) Rigorous pre-testing with diverse audiences is crucial before launching broad ad campaigns.

My thoughts

I thought it lacked a bit of emotional context for me. This ad did not make me feel anything and I did not really connect emotionally. Emotional bonds should be one of the main focuses in brand awareness, to develop that long-lasting relationship with the brand. But here, it seems there was none. While the ad is impressive and satisfying, it does not really tell any story. It does make a point of greatly illustrating the USP of the iPad: one tool to replace all your favorite IRL tools packed into one modern Swiss army knife.

Regarding the controversy, the fact that the ad for LG was also for a smartphone, makes the Crush! easily comparable. But talking about the backlash, there was no backlash back then when the LG ad got out. And there was much less visibility as to what extent that tech could have replaced the workforce. Historically, the Man fears what he does not know. So it could have easily turned into a similar backlash, if not worse. With the current sensitivity around how GPTs are changing our lives and the job market, the main backlash has been perceiving the ad as crushing human creativity as we relate to it.

In a first mea culpa, this is the first time Apple issued a public apology. This ad was first posted on Apple’s. YouTube channel, getting 1 million views in 2 days), Tim Cook’s X(formerly Twitter) feed stacking over 53 million views. Apple decided to cancel the TV broadcast of this 60-second ad.

There is not much information online about the creative process of this ad out there. But I would think that a little bit of A/B testing/user testing would have given a clear signal on such a sensitive topic, and how the ad could have been perceived before putting it out there (not sure if Apple did this or not). I wrote about the importance of A/B testing here: