“We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” the company owned up, as it withdrew the ad from circulation. “Crush” will not appear in the pre-booked TV slots, but the damage has been done.
In the past, Apple has shamelessly co-opted artistic genius to build its luxury brand before. It tries to persuade us that all the cool, creative people use Apple products, while only boring normies use those made by its rivals. Poor people, and people with no taste, in other words. Don’t be like them!
Today, the “Ratner Moment” is taught in business lessons as an executive disaster-class in what not to say.
The chief executive joked that the jewellery he sold is so cheap that it would be outlasted by a prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencer.
Today, with each customer investing thousands of pounds in the Apple ecosystem of products, we’re not going to abandon the company overnight. But it’s worse than “doing a Ratner”, because it dramatises how Big Tech views us, and what we value.
We recoil from such imagery because we know that we really don’t need to destroy something beautiful to create something interesting and new.
That was the proposition the town planners insisted we must accept in the 1960s, as they laid waste to our beautiful Victorian heritage, and what Russell T Davies and Disney maintain today, as they take an axe to Doctor Who.
It’s false, however. Old things can take on new forms and find new uses. As a builder you can add, not subtract. Our disquiet is heightened by the imminent arrival of what’s branded as artificial intelligence, and a great flood of derivative, low quality “content paste”.
It’s making the world duller because it’s all derivative and feels much less human. It’s coming at a great cost to human creators.
How could Apple misjudge the audience so badly? Steve Jobs would surely have been appalled, and sacked everyone involved: including Tim Cook, the paperclips guy who took Jobs’ seat. Perhaps Apple is lost without its late co-founder, and we only now see how badly lost it is.