Apple Is Facing Intense Criticism Over Its ‘Heartbreaking’ iPad Pro Ad. It’s the 1 Thing No Brand Should Ever Do

During Apple’s iPad event on Tuesday, the company showed a one-minute ad to debut the new iPad Pro. The ad shows a massive press crushing a pile of what can only be described as a collection of creative tools. There’s a piano, a guitar, and some camera lenses, along with other creative tools like paint and books and a sculpture. All of it ends up destroyed, and in its place, we see the iPad Pro.

Response to the ad has been almost universally negative.

Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, shared the ad on X. It has more than 4,000 replies at the time I’m writing this and I couldn’t find a single response that wasn’t some version of “Who thought this was a good idea?” The general sentiment seems to be that the ad is “heartbreaking,” and “destructive.” Almost all of the replies I scrolled through are negative.

Interestingly, I think there was a clever idea behind the ad. For that matter, Apple is not a company short on clever ideas. It has, historically, done as good a job as any brand at telling creative and compelling stories. Over the weekend, for example, Apple ran a Star Wars-themed ad highlighting its Find Your Friends feature. It was very good. So were its quirky ads highlighting remote work, as well as some of its privacy ads. 

Of course, the problem is that sometimes a clever idea gets in the way of the story you’re trying to tell. That’s exactly what happened here. 

Update: Apple recently admitted that the ad’s video missed the mark. “Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Apple told AdAge.

I think the story Apple was trying to convey is pretty simple: The new iPad Pro has all of these powerful creative capabilities. The ad is maybe trying to suggest that all of the instruments and artistic tools are all compressed into a 5.1mm tablet, but that’s not the message people are taking away. 

Instead, the message people are taking away is that Apple is saying the iPad “crushes” and essentially replaces all of those items. It is, quite literally, destroying them. That’s a problem for a company that has long prided itself on being a partner that makes devices and software that serve as tools for creatives. It’s a central part of its marketing story and was a big part of the iPad story itself. The highlight of the iPad 2 introduction was Steve Jobs’s demo of Garage Band.

I was in New York City for the iPad Event, and in the room, no one talked about the ad. I suspect that’s because most of the people who were there cover Apple and are somewhat used to the way Apple tells stories. It wasn’t hard to see the story the company was trying to tell. 

Probably, the message is something along the lines of “we want to show how powerful the iPad Pro is by illustrating all of the creative ways you can use it.” Instead, the story is “we’re going to crush all of these traditional tools and replace them with our pretty technology.”

Honestly, that’s not all that uncommon for tech companies, which tend to believe that their product is the solution to all the problems you might have. There’s a lack of ability to read the room. I suppose, to some extent, you have to believe that the thing you are making is exceptional or else it’s not worth the effort. The problem comes when you lose sight of the people you’re making it for and the things they care most about.  

If you’re a musician, an iPad isn’t going to replace your guitar or your upright piano. You might use it alongside those instruments, but it doesn’t replace them, and you certainly don’t want to think of it as destroying them.

That’s what makes this such a bad look — it was an attempt to tell a good story, but it lost sight of the narrative. It’s a near miss that should have been caught. Someone should have stood up and said, “Hey, this goes against our brand promise to creatives. Maybe we shouldn’t make it.”

After all, your brand is the way people feel about your company. It’s the sum of all the stories you tell and, more importantly, all of the interactions someone has with your products and your people. In this case, the ad isn’t telling the story Apple thinks it’s telling, and that’s a real problem. The fact that it let a clever idea sabotage the story it wanted to tell is the perfect example of the one thing no brand should ever do. 

I reached out to Apple, but did not immediately receive a response.