Crush or create?
So Apple has apologised for its “crush” iPad ad. The big question is, how on earth did they think it was a good idea in the first place. Anybody with the slightest sense of storytelling would’ve realised how dramatically misguided and totally offbrand the ad is.
Keep it simple
The simple StoryWorks approach to storytelling, gives you not only a framework to create stories, but also a framework to sense check what is presented to you. So you can work out easily if the story is likely to achieve what you want it to. Which fundamentallyt is to attract your intended audience’s attention and then have them remember you positively.
The framework has a simple acronym: E.R.O.S., which stands for;
- Empathetic character,
- Risk/Reward,
- Obstacle,
- Surprise.
The essence of great stories is an empathetic character really wants something (or wants to avoid something) and something stands in their way. The surprise is there to attract our attention at the start.
Think Different, but Think
Apple certainly achieves the S, the surprise. Which has generated the fury with the ad. But after that, it all falls apart. There is no empathetic character, really striving to achieve something that matters to them against the odds.
Instead we have a powerful, inhuman force easily crushing all that human beings value about what it is to be human and creative. The story is: hugely rich corporation destroys creative objects to make it more money. It is the polar opposite of how Apple launched itself almost exactly forty years ago with its 1984 commercial at the Super Bowl.
Imagine Different
Obviously, the takeout of ‘Crush’ is supposed to be something along the lines of. “You can create all this amazing stuff with the thinnest, lightest iPad ever. Apple’s success over the last forty years has been based on empowering people, rather than crushing them.
Given that brief, using the EROS approach, you might imagine a composer struggling to drag a grand piano up a hill to compose music watching a glorious sun set. Or a painter wrestling with their unwieldy easel and improbably large box of paints up the same hill. Or the writer nervously balancing their manual Remington typewriter precariously on their knees as they gaze at the same sunset. The photographer with their 19th century Daguerrotype wooden box camera, sweating it up to the peak.
All of them can now create what they want with the new iPad. Easily, anywhere.