The ad starts with a thirty-something blond man standing in the kitchen of what appears to be an expensive, post-modern home, spacious and bright, with some well-manicured trees visible through the bay windows. Dressed in a tasteful-yet-generic linen shirt, the man is vaguely handsome yet nerdy. With his Germanic features, beard, and shoulder-length blond hair, he looks a bit like Thor, if Thor were retired and had become a web designer. In other words, he seems to represent the best-case scenario for a lot of aging tech-bros. Sure, your features might have sagged a little, and you might have a bit of a paunch, but you’re still a stud.
The opening shot shows the man slipping on what appears to be an extra-large set of ski goggles, with some strange, high-tech Whangdoodles on the side. This is, we instantly realize, the product that the ad is hawking—Apple latest virtual reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is taken up by the opening ostinato of Supertramp’s “Dreamer,” a song once beloved by the late 70s, post-Vietnam counterculture but which has now been co-opted by the Apple Corporation. Indeed, the song sets the theme for the entire ad. The man we are looking at is the “dreamer,” but we, the viewers, are too. We are all, the ad suggests, preparing to enter a world of high-technology magic, where our entire lives will be transformed (for the better, as in a dream) by this newest gizmo.
Continue reading “Let’s Deconstruct an Ad: “Hello Apple Vision Pro””
Ash Clifton, Writer 