Focus groups, indeed.
Let me digress just a moment. I have devoted my entire career to representing creatives–the past 25 years of my life. I have an imdb page with most (not all) of the films I’ve handled; I’ve tried motion picture copyright infringement and fair use cases to juries in order to stand up for, and protect creators. For ten years I was an editor of the Los Angeles Lawyer’s annual entertainment law issue. I’m a partner in the premier music law firm in the U.S. I saw the ad and thought it was great and was surprised that people found it offensive. Admittedly, I did not see this perspective at all. My background and my opinion, however, are absolutely, totally irrelevant and meaningless (well, to this issue, anyway!).
People did find it offensive, maybe even disturbing. Just a sampling from this thread is telling:
This is where @Synchronicity hit the nail on the head. If Apple had done focus groups (and, sheesh, maybe it did) it might have discovered a set of people who saw the ads from this perspective. That might have given Apple’s marketing team some pause. Maybe just changing the theme from “crush” to something else might have made people receive the ad better.
Image may be NSFW.
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Maybe this controversy is overblown, and maybe people should be less offended by ads, and maybe people should be giving Apple the benefit of the doubt after all that it’s done to promote creativity. But they didn’t and this is now a thing (at least in some corner of the Internet). From a PR perspective, it was avoidable.