Apple angered a lot of people with its latest ad for the iPad Pro M4, so much so that the firm issued a public apology after the reactions of many personalities.
Whether you like advertisements or not, there are surely some that have left their mark on your mind with their ingenuity, their humor or the message they convey. We remember it long after the broadcast, whether they made us buy the product concerned or not. Even if the relationship with advertising has changed a lot since the time when television was their main distribution channel, brands are still seeking to reproduce this effect. Unfortunately for Applepeople will remember the iPad Pro M4 ad, but not for the right reasons.
Entitled “Crush!” (crush), we see a hydraulic press crushing a whole bunch of objects: pots and tubes of paint, a guitar, an arcade machine, cameras, a battery, a typewriter, books, a table, computer screens displaying photo editing software… Then the press gets up and unveils the iPad Pro. In the background, the song of Sonny & Cher “All I ever need is you“, or “all I need is you” in the language of Molière. The metaphor is very clear and it doesn’t get across.
Apple apologizes after iPad Pro M4 ad aired
The actor Hugh Grant summarizes the video as “the destruction of the human experience“. For the producer, director and writer Asif Kapadia“it’s the most honest metaphor for what tech companies do to the arts, to artists, musicians, creators, writers, filmmakers: squeeze them, use them, don’t pay them well, take everything and then say it was created by them“. Faced with this outcry, Apple had no choice but to apologize.
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“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to build products that enable creatives around the world to flourish. Our goal is to celebrate the myriad ways people express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the boat with this video and we are sorry“, says Tor Myhren, vice president of business communications at Apple. The company decided not to air the ad on television as originally planned.