New iPad TV Ad. This Bad

Recent Apple ads have not been bold or different.

Video available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=DJxZ0HVQXo8.

I am not a tech guy. My first thought when I hear “tablet” is “Klonopin”.

However I am ad ad guy. I’ve been making ads for 20+ years, and reviewing them for seven, and am old enough to remember the bold Apple advertising of the late 1990s — “Think Different.” Recent Apple ads have not been bold or different. They’ve been boring as fuck. No edge. No cool. And most importantly, no big idea. This :30 TV spot for the new iPad is the worst of them.

Visually, there is nothing unexpected. Kids and butterflies and flowers and balloons and kids and more balloons. Great. I’ve now got 10 ova in my ballsack. The copy is just puzzling, especially this line: “Because when a screen becomes this good, it’s just you, and the things you care about.” A philosophy professor would have fun with that logic progression. It reads like a line that was group-banged by about 10 people.(It is a very nice screen, though.)

The seemingly in-need-of-sleep voiceover talent sounds about as interested in the product as I am. The retina screen may be crystal clear, but his pronunciation wasn’t. I had to listen twice to figure out he was saying “pin-sharp”. And, “pin-sharp” is just a weird phrase, too.

And then there’s the music. It manages to be both innocuous and annoying at the same time; the repeated piano high notes are so fucking grating. Jesus.

The five+ minute promo video (below) is no better. Again, there’s no concept, it’s choppy, it’s crappy, and it’s all over the place, product feature-wise. But there is one line in it that I thought should have been in the :30 spot: “The highest resolution display ever on a mobile device.” As a non-tablet-owning human, THAT is at least mildly interesting to me.

Video available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=AEngFNb5CRU.