On New Year’s Eve, Apple released a 65-second advertisement that epitomises everything going awry in contemporary marketing. Two detectives stand in a shadowy warehouse, lecturing about the “crash zoom”—how it “heightens tension,” “builds suspense,” and “foreshadows danger.”
The ad is arch, knowing, deliberately theatrical. And it’s precisely the sort of clever advertising that risks making ordinary people feel uninformed and alienated.
Apple’s “Detectives 8x Zoom” ad arrives at a peculiar inflection point for marketing. The ad forms part of the “Shot on iPhone” campaign—one of modern marketing’s most successful platforms, generating $14 billion in incremental iPhone sales since 2015. Yet Apple abandoned the democratic authenticity that built this franchise for something altogether more exclusionary: a meta-commentary that assumes viewers understand what a crash zoom is.
This isn’t universal language. It’s film school semiotics.
The ad is arch, knowing, deliberately theatrical. And it’s precisely the sort of clever advertising that risks making ordinary people feel uninformed and alienated.
Apple’s “Detectives 8x Zoom” ad arrives at a peculiar inflection point for marketing. The ad forms part of the “Shot on iPhone” campaign—one of modern marketing’s most successful platforms, generating $14 billion in incremental iPhone sales since 2015. Yet Apple abandoned the democratic authenticity that built this franchise for something altogether more exclusionary: a meta-commentary that assumes viewers understand what a crash zoom is.
This isn’t universal language. It’s film school semiotics.
