Apple’s attempts to make us love tech seem to be foundering
The dreaded AI will just make everything worse
Apple got itself into a fix with its ‘Crush’ commercial, said by many to signal the obliteration of creativity by technology (seemed OK to us) and now System1, which grades ads according to their emotional impact, has given a resounding no-no to a new iPad tech effort,
‘Worlds Made on iPad’ (below) scored 1.5 Stars with System1’s Test Your Ad, even lower than ‘Crush’ with 1.9. Other recent Apple ads, ‘the Invincibles’ and ‘The Greatest,’ which majored on people rather than tech, scored 5.4 and 3.8 respectively.
System1 chief customer officer Jon Evanscsays: “Has Apple gone too far in trying to fix what they “crushed”? Their latest effort seems, once again, to have fallen too far from the creativity tree.
“Their best ads won us over on emotion. They have relatable, living characters front and centre, focussed on how the product helps overcome adversity, and integrated the product into the story – rather than the product being the story.”
Well, yes, but that’s the issue with tech. At bottom the problem seems to be that many of us are thoroughly fed up with it, even those wedded to their phones (mobile computers) for most of the day.
We see it as unavoidable but a burden to be borne rather than something to look forward to and embrace. It’s surely why the world turned resolutely away from Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. Facebook has done enough to muck up lives without us wishing to be transported into a new universe of its very own making.
Apple, somehow or other, has cleverly managed to seem unlike the other tech giants, actually on our side (even though from time to time it’s the world’s biggest company by value, its products are eye-wateringly expensive and it tries to kill competition just as hard as Facebook.)
Some of this is due to the AI revolution, seen as the latest incarnation of “the computer says no.” Everybody hates chatbots (apart from the companies trying to axe jobs and the digital transformation zealots advising them) and that’s what AI means to lots of people.
It’s a poser for the tech giants trying to make us love these things. So far they’re struggling.
