Someone sent me the new iPad ad at 9:40 this morning with no message attached. Just the link. That is how I knew what kind of day it was going to be.
A hydraulic press comes down on a trumpet, a piano, cans of paint, a metronome, an arcade cabinet, a stack of books. Everything cracks and squeals and flattens. The press lifts. Underneath is the new iPad Pro, very thin.
The craft is genuinely good. The sound design is better than good. The idea reads in four seconds, which is more than most brand films manage in ninety.
Which is exactly the problem.
The ad did not fail to communicate. It communicated perfectly, and what it communicated is that the company sees your instruments as raw material.
Metaphors have direction and you do not get to choose it after the fact. The intended reading is compression: all of this, inside that. The available reading is destruction: all of this, ended, so that could exist. Both are sitting in the same footage. Only one of them has a trumpet screaming on the way down.
Apple built decades of equity standing next to the person making the thing. The 1984 spot smashed the screen, not the artist. The crazy ones were people with hands. Putting the brand on the plunger side of the press inverts that in under a minute of extremely expensive film.
Then there is the timing, which nobody in that approval chain seems to have weighed. This lands in a year when every illustrator, session player, and copywriter I know is already fielding the question of whether the tool is coming for the job. Into that room walks an actual machine crushing an actual piano, asking everyone to feel good about thinness.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, so I know how it happens. Nobody in that chain saw destruction, because they had been living inside the intended reading for four months. That is what a long production timeline does to people. It makes you fluent in your own intention and deaf to the plain image. By month three, the press is a symbol. To the rest of us it is a press.
The test was never whether the room understands the metaphor. The room always understands the metaphor. The test is what it looks like to a person who sees it once, at 9:40 in the morning, with no brief and no context and no reason to be generous.
Metaphors have direction and you do not get to choose it after the fact.
Thursday I will be at the sticky-floored place in Southeast where the host calls everyone baby, singing something two keys too high for me in front of eleven people. Nothing about it is thin, efficient, or compressed. That is the entire appeal.