Savvier Second Opinion · No. 4
Apple Apologized for an iPad Ad.
Did They Need To?
Second Opinion is a regular series from Savvier, the AI platform for marketing teams. Each week we take something in culture, run it through Savvier workflows, and share what might have been better.
The Situation
Tim Cook steps down as Apple CEO on September 1 after 15 years in the role. With that chapter closing, we thought it was a good moment to look back at one of the more talked-about advertising moments of his tenure.
FIG. 01 · Still from “Crush!” · Apple, May 2024
Back in May 2024, Apple released an ad called “Crush!” to launch the iPad Pro. Sixty seconds of a hydraulic press slowly crushing a piano, guitars, cameras, paint cans, books, and a record player. When the press lifts, an iPad Pro is all that’s left.
Tim Cook shared it with the caption: “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.”
Hugh Grant, for one, wasn’t a big fan. “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley.” He wasn’t alone. Within 48 hours Apple had apologized (“We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry”) and the ad was off TV. Samsung saw an opening and took it, releasing a counter-ad called “UnCrush” that showed a young woman picking up a guitar from the wreckage and playing, with a Galaxy Tab propped up beside her for sheet music. It was a pointed response: the competitor had just made a warmer, more human ad about creativity than Apple had.
The thing is, the iPad Pro really does do all of that. All of those tools, in 5.1mm. The idea behind the ad was compression. What ended up on screen looked more like destruction. Did the agency confuse the two?
We decided to take a closer look.
The Breakdown
Method · Three Savvier workflows
Savvier has 60+ workflows designed by leading marketing experts, and each one is a recipe for a specific marketing job. We ran three here. Strategic Feedback, to evaluate the ad against Apple’s own brand. Creative Brief, to write the brief Apple should have started from. And Video Script & Storyboard, to produce the ad that brief would have led to. Let’s begin.
01
Strategic Feedback
The evaluation
Strategic Feedback looks at a piece of work and tells you whether it fits the brand. We gave it the Crush ad and Apple’s 40-year advertising history as context. The assessment comes from Savvier’s AI strategist agent, in their own words.
Priority 01
How the ad treats creative work
Take “For Apple’s core audience, a piano, a guitar, a camera, and a sketchbook carry the weight of years of practice and output. They represent an accumulated creative life. Crush treats that accumulated life as material to be flattened. That’s the gap: the ad communicates ‘your work can be compressed’ when it should communicate ‘your work has depth, and this device can hold all of it.’”
Reco “The brief should have started from a different question: how do you show the weight and depth of a creative career inside 5.1mm, without treating it as something to be crushed?”
Priority 02
The wrong metaphor for compression
Take “The product message, everything fits in 5.1mm, is about containment. There are many ways to show containment: depth, layers, geological scale, a world held inside a thin frame. Destruction is not one of them. A hydraulic press communicates force and elimination, not depth and capacity. The ad chose a metaphor that contradicts the product truth it was trying to communicate.”
Reco “The visual metaphor for ‘everything fits inside this’ should show depth, not force. The question isn’t how thin the device is. The question is how much it holds.”
“The question isn’t how thin the device is. The question is how much it holds.”
Key Finding · Strategic Feedback
02
Creative Brief
The brief Apple should have started from
Creative Brief takes a brand and a project and writes the brief a creative team can work from. We gave it Apple and the iPad Pro M4 launch, along with the strategic feedback findings, and asked it to produce the brief that should have existed before anyone started making an ad. The tension, the insight, the proposition, and two creative directions all come from the workflow.
The tension
A creative career accumulates real weight: years of sketches, drafts, recordings, projects, and half-finished ideas scattered across drives, devices, and decades. That body of work has never had a single place to live, and most creatives have never seen it whole. The weight is real. The device that holds it should feel like it understands that.
The insight
“A creative career builds in layers. Every draft, every revision, every project adds depth. No device has ever shown that depth back to the person who built it.”
If this is true Apple should show the depth of what the device holds, not the thinness of the device itself.
The proposition
“Deep enough for everything you do.”
What we want them to believe The iPad Pro has more depth than its dimensions suggest. 5.1mm of device, decades of work inside.
“A creative career builds in layers. No device has ever shown that depth back to the person who built it.”
Key Insight · Creative Brief
We took this brief and ran it through Video Script & Storyboard to see what it would produce.
03
Video Script & Storyboard
The ad
We ran the creative brief through Big Ideas 2.0, which generates campaign concepts from different strategic angles. One concept stood out: “Topography,” a creative career rendered as geological terrain, held inside a device 5.1mm thin. We then ran that concept through Video Script & Storyboard to turn it into a full production script. Two scripts came out. This is the one we liked best: “The Canyon.” A camera climbs a vast canyon wall whose strata are the layers of a creative life, from student sketches at the base to professional mastery near the top. When the camera pulls back, the canyon resolves into the edge of an iPad Pro.
FIG. 02 · Mood board · “The Canyon” · Generated via workflow
“The Canyon” · :60
Darkness. The camera is at the base of a canyon wall, inches from the surface. Pressed into what looks like stone are pencil lines: rough perspective grids, hand-drawn geometric studies. The marks of someone beginning.
The camera begins a slow vertical climb. The pencil stratum gives way to ink: architectural blueprints compressed into sediment. Floor plans, elevation drawings, section cuts. Above them, a thin membrane of translucent trace paper, still faintly amber.
Higher. The stratum shifts to sheet music pressed into the rock like fossils. Staff lines run horizontally in thin dark seams. A passage of dense counterpoint compacted into a single inch of stone. Above it, a single melodic line, sparse and clean.
Higher still. Film frames, stacked and laminated into the stratum. Sprocket holes running vertically like stitching. Then digital renders, 3D wireframes collapsed into thin planes. A decade of screen work solidified into geology.
Near the top, the stratum thickens. Multiple disciplines compressed together: the years of full creative force. Then it begins to thin and lighten. The most recent work, still settling.
The surface. A luminous band of light runs across the top edge. The specific, unmistakable glow of an Ultra Retina XDR display. Below it, the full depth of a career. Above it, nothing yet.
The camera pulls back. What was a canyon wall resolves into the edge of an iPad Pro, held sideways in a hand. The canyon was the screen. Everything the camera climbed through is inside it.
“5.1mm. Deep enough for everything you do.”
“Crush used 5.1mm to sell thinness. The Canyon uses the same number to show depth. Deep enough for everything you do.”
Key Contrast · Video Script & Storyboard
The Takeaway
The question
The strategist put it simply: “the question isn’t how thin the device is, it’s how much it holds.”
The insight
The creative brief found the insight that made the script possible: creative professionals feel the mass of their work but have never seen it whole. The distance between a hydraulic press and a geological landscape is the distance between two ideas about what that work is worth.
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