Apple Says Destructive iPad Ad ‘Missed the Mark’
The New York Times
People in the creative world widely panned a commercial showing a giant hydraulic press squishing objects ranging from paint cans to a piano.
Apple doesn’t make mistakes often and seldom apologizes, but on Thursday, its head of advertising said the company had erred in making a new iPad commercial that showed an industrial compressor flattening tools for art, music and creativity.
“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” said Tor Myhren, the company’s vice president of marketing communications, in a statement provided to the publication AdAge. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”
Mr. Myhren said Apple would no longer run the ad on TV.
The company had faced a barrage of criticism from designers, actors and artists who saw the ad as a metaphor for how Big Tech has cashed in on their work by crushing or co-opting the artistic tools that humanity has used for centuries.
They found the crushing of a trumpet, piano, paints and a sculpture particularly unnerving at a time when artists fear that generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry and create movies, might take away their jobs.
Apple had intended the ad to send the opposite message, that its ultrathin iPad Pro could power an array of creative activities that previously required individual tools.
