Apple's New iPad Ad: Trash or Treasure? EP3

Episode 3 Transcript

Welcome to the Marketing Combat Podcast. I'm Chris Kubbernus and this is Jason Donnelly. Every single weekday we battle it out for about five minutes for your pleasure. Best part, we both know the marketing related topic beforehand, but one of us gets to decide what they're actually fighting for, which means the other person has to defend something that they may not actually want to defend.

That's right. Today's topic, Apple's new iPad ad, treasure or trash. I'm gonna go with, I'm so nervous. I kinda wanna mess with you a bit, dude. Do it. I kinda don't. I kinda like, I'm gonna go with treasure. I'm gonna take the position that that iPad ad was spot on. I really feel like, and if you haven't seen it, it's an ad where basically it's for the new thin, thinnest iPad ever. And Apple's in -house creative team made it.

They're really crushing it lately. think they're doing an awesome job that in house team. Basically they.

They just took a lot of different medias, sculptures, pianos, instruments, drawing stuff, any kind of creative medium that you can think of. They put it into a giant press and basically pressed it all, like crushed it all. Things were breaking chaos. It was visually stunning. It was fantastically shot and edited. Good music, good soundtrack, and basically crushing everything into a nice thin looking iPad that makes you just go, yes, that's what I need in my life. I want to condense.

all of the different things that I have in my life, my creative tools, my acumen, my...

my skills, I want to condense that all down into the thinnest iPad because I just need a really nice piece of work material that's like easy to transport, easy to go to meetings with, easy to draw with, everything. And I'm really looking forward to the thin one. So I think it's actually a pretty good ad. It's a little bit nostalgic, a little bit like reminiscent of an old, you know, Kia ad. So it's kind of playing on some of that nostalgia for early tech videos. So I think it's a great ad and I think it's going to, it's drawn up a lot of attention as well, right? I mean, everybody now knows that the iPad is coming up.

a really thin one. Almost everybody knows a new thin iPad coming out. So when it comes to like attention grabbing, it's done a fantastic job. Here's the thing. Every creative out there, especially on the artist side of things, saw this as destruction of everything that they love. they're saying, like you said, the sculpturing stuff, the crayons, the art, the painting stuff, the, I mean, even retro arcade machine that they...

rushed and pretend like they're putting that into an iPad. That ad was visually boring. It was slow. It was just...

the music wasn't even like anything special. You said the music was special, but like Apple used to have all this crazy music that people would listen to like obscure stuff. VW used to do it. They used to bring all this cool music that nobody knew in. But now with this one, it was just a machine crushing a bunch of beautiful pieces of art, a guitar, and pretending like you can do everything on an iPad. It was a huge miss. They could have done so much more if they did it in reverse, if they played the video in reverse and it was like

and nothing and then all of the things came out of it all this crazy incredible creative came out of the iPad that'd be one thing but you're not you're not gonna make anybody especially artists especially creators happy by pretending like you can squish all this fun stuff into a flimsy little iPad I think that Apple played

exactly into everybody's hands. I think that they knew people would reverse the ad. I think that they knew people would complain about this and put their own creative spin on it. I think that they knew the attention that this would give. They knew that it was controversial. They knew it was a little bit opposite of what you'd expect from Apple. And I think they knew that the internet's memeing...

culture was gonna take this and put their own spin on it and make fun of it and be aggressive about it. And I think that they played right into everybody's hands. because it just feels like it, like it just feels like it was too simple, too easy to like do and too simple. think it's a, I think visually also like you even said it, like there's images burned into your mind about this ad and that's special. Like I don't think there's a lot of ads that do that these days where you remember.

the specific visuals, like that's where I think this ad actually shines from from a treasure standpoint is like, can visually just recall, yeah, that, that, that statue head breaking the arcade machine, even the iPad at the end, like I can visually remember all of that. Most ads these days, you don't remember things 10 seconds after you see it, but that ad you remember. Just because you remember it doesn't mean it's good. It makes me sad and it hurts my heart.

and we're talking about hearts a lot and Apple missed. That's why they apologized to all creatives who are up in arms and angry about the ad that missed. It's just a fact. It missed. Creatives are babies. You're a baby. Is this, this is how we're going to combat now? We're just going to start calling our names, calling each other names? love this idea. No, so that's our take on the Apple iPad, thin iPad ad. I was for it. I think it's a brilliant piece of creative work, brilliant advertising. I think it's going to go down in history as one of the best ads of all time. What?

Of course it is, of course it's the best ad ever. Way better than anything Apple's ever done. I mean, it's like, it's top, it's top one. This why we cut the video. Cut the video. Well, it's another pun in the name. It's one of the best ads ever. Learn it, break it. It's visually stunning.

memorable. It played right into the internet culture's hands. knew that it would. That's my position. Jason, what's your position? Just to wrap it up and then we'll call, we'll do the next one. Apple, the only way that I would think that this ad could be successful is if you send me one of the new Apple iPads so that I can test it and see if all of that stuff can be squished into or, yeah, squished into it. Send me one. I want one.

Send us both one. I already have a supporter. You'll probably get one anyway. Yes, you'll probably get one. Okay, that's great. Thanks for tuning in today. Did you say I'm gonna get one? No, not for me. Thanks for that. You're like, I like the ad if I get a new iPad. I can look at it lot. That's how good the ad was. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Marketing Combat.

Podcasts every day we tackle a new topic somebody's for it somebody's against it. I guess you could call that the devil's advocate It's a fantastic podcast every day. We're coming to five minutes really quick and dirty You get to listen to what we think about something and that's it So tune in subscribe like comment share everything you can do to make this as big of a podcast as possible Do all that that would be super happy. We'll send you iPads. Just let us know we'll send iPads crushed ones, but I put it okay. We'll cut it See you guys. Thanks for tuning in