A new minute-long spot from Apple spruiking its iPad Pro has made animators and their creativity the star.
The ad features American actress Sofia Wylie on one piece of green screen footage, with three animators using the iPad Pro, with its new M4 chip, and the Apple Pencil Pro to create imagined worlds.
The “Forest” animation on the left of the screen was created by Natalie Labarre, while the “Theatre” and“Colossus” animations were created by Jin & Jay and Eric Lane, respectively. The spot is set to Concentrate by Billy Lemos featuring Dua Saleh.
Apple recently landed itself in some hot water for another iPad Pro ad. Its “Crush!” spot was roundly criticised after it showed a huge hydraulic press squashing a piano, guitar, old records, pots of paint, video game machine and other culturally significant artistic objects that consumers use.
“Back when I was a kid I wanted to be the women in your 1984 commercial (see video below) raging against the boring uniformity of the PC machine,” System1 chief customer officer and host of the Uncensored CMO podcast Jon Evans said. “Now I fear you may have become the machine.
“You left people a little surprised with a fair amount of negative emotion and quite a few people didn’t even realise it was an advert for Apple.”
System1 tested the spot and it received a low star rating of 1.9 (which predicts long-term market share growth), a low spike rating of 0.78 (which indicates short-term sales potential) and a modest fluency rating of 77 (brand recognition).
Even British actor Hugh Grant saw fit to jump on the pillorying of the ad — “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley,” he posted on Twitter.
Apple marketing VP Tor Myhren told Ad Age “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.”
The ad has since been pulled from TV.
TBWA’s Media Arts Lab division has handled Apple’s creative account since 1984.
