The Epic short was in three separate group texts before I had finished breakfast last Thursday, which is not a thing that happens to advertising anymore.
If you missed the week: Epic put a cheaper direct payment option into Fortnite, Apple pulled the game from the App Store within hours, and Epic answered with a lawsuit that had obviously been written weeks earlier and a short film called Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite. Shot for shot, it is Apple's own 1984 commercial. The gray rows of drones. The runner with the hammer. The face on the enormous screen, except the face is an apple.
Five days later people in my feed are still passing it around. So let me say the uncomfortable thing plainly.
The sharpest piece of brand craft anybody has shipped this year is a legal strategy with a rendering budget attached.
Three reasons it works, and none of them are the animation.
One, the timing is the craft. The film, the complaint, the hashtag and the in-game merchandise all landed inside the same news cycle. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I can tell you what that costs. Legal, product, creative and comms had to sit in the same document for weeks, with the launch trigger held by people who could not explain to anyone why. Most companies cannot get a press release and a landing page to agree on a date.
Two, it uses the audience memory as raw material instead of explaining anything. The film does not argue that Apple has become the thing it once mocked. It puts Apple in the exact frame Apple built for IBM and lets you finish the sentence yourself. That is borrowed equity turned against the lender, and it is very hard to answer, because the only rebuttal is to disown your own founding myth.
Three, and this is the part that gets lost, most of the players watching have never seen the original. They were born after 2005. It works anyway, because the grammar of that ad has been recycled so many times that its shape is ambient. You do not need the source to feel the shape.
That is borrowed equity turned against the lender, and it is very hard to answer, because the only rebuttal is to disown your own founding myth.
Where I get itchy: this is a very large company doing rebellion cosplay against another very large company over a thirty percent cut, and the film invites a twelve-year-old to feel like a resistance fighter about it. Both parties want the same money. Neither one is the runner with the hammer.
Admire the execution. Notice the machinery underneath it. I keep thinking about the pitch rooms where the brave idea died because nobody could get three departments into one meeting, and Epic got four of them to keep a secret for a month.