Weekly Scroll: Rotten Apple

Plus! The Menswear Guy, a new Publishing Strategy, and Influencer Extinction

Welcome to the weekend scroll, where I guide you through the most interesting news from the social internet each week. This week’s edition analyzes yet another tech PR fiasco, how influencers are facing down TikTok’s potential ban, the continued popularity of the Menswear Guy, a new strategy among gaming creators, and ends with a very special new dance craze.

Apple’s Terrible Ad

Everybody’s mad at this ad for the new iPad:

The ad shows a bunch of stuff - musical instruments, art supplies, video games, etc - crushed under a hydraulic press. When the press lifts back up, what’s left is the new iPad. I’m sure you get the concept. You smusha da things, you getta da iPad, eyyyyy…

But people sure don’t seem to be happy!

TechCrunch calls it disgusting.¹ The CBC calls it gross, and the SF Chronicle thinks the ad is ‘disturbing’. The language was even more vitriolic on social media. Apple had to take the rare step of issuing an official apology. Some have even pointed out that the ad is far more inspiring if you play it in reverse.

I can see why some folks were put off by the ad’s direction. People have cultural attachments to things like artistic tools, musical instruments, etc. They don’t like to see them crushed by a giant machine. There’s a weird sort of cultural role-reversal from Apple’s most famous ad - Apple used to be the colorful human fighting against a drab faceless machine, and now they appear to be crushing all that is colorful and human in favor of a drab machine. It’s not a great choice!

That said: even as a connoisseur of terrible PR efforts, I find many of the reactions here to be a bit histrionic. It’s an iPad. Who gives a shit? Who is possibly getting worked up about an iPad? And that, I think, is the real heart of what’s happening here - Apple has no idea how to market a dead product line.

Now, ‘dead’ is relative here. I’m sure other companies would love to have a ‘dead’ product line that does $30B a year in revenue. But the problem for Apple is that the iPad did $30.9B in sales in 2012 and hasn’t grown at all in the 12 years since, doing only $28.2B in 2023. Basically every other part of Apple is growing in the long run. Mac sales are growing, services are growing, wearables are growing, iPhones are growing, AppleTV and News and Music and Pay are all growing. And the iPad is spinning its wheels, stuck in the mud, the unloved stepchild of the Apple portfolio.

This is a device whose main audience is small children and elderly people. Apple can tout it as a creative device, but come on. If it was going to succeed there it would have already succeeded a decade ago. The iPad barely has a reason to exist, and what’s crucial about this Latest and Greatest iPad is that it has no real updates. The marketing push has focused around it being thinner than before and having a cool new ultrafast chip. Cool? Great job to Tim Apple on that one. Thin new chip, super exciting. Again, the question is who cares?

Apple doesn’t know how to market the iPad because they don’t have any new features to announce, and they can’t very well say ‘Buy this crap if you’re either too old or too young to work with real computers and the old one broke’. So they reached for some abstract conceptual marketing pitch and ended up getting it wrong.

Frankly, I’m not sure this even worked out that badly for them. In the face of PR disasters, every flack will respond with the phrase ‘All Press is Good Press!’. This is usually a massive cope, but in this case it might be true? The iPad is a dead end product line that’s going nowhere, but at least people now have a reason to think about it. It can’t be worse than the status quo of ‘nobody thinks about the iPad at all’.

The Continued Power of Menswear Guy