Tor Myhren speaks! Apple’s marketing man on a decade of shepherding the world’s most sterling brand (exclusive)

Tor Myhren is going to kind of hate this article. Because it’s about him, not his entire team. Because I want to talk about his shift from agency chief creative officer to leading marketing for the most pristine marketer on the planet, not to mention one of the world’s most valuable companies. Because I want to talk about how he’s been doing it for 10 years in an industry where brands change senior marketing executives as frequently as their socks. And because I want to start with the worst moment of his decade at Apple. At the time, Myhren had a singular focus. In early 2024, Apple’s VP of marketing communications was sitting with his team, thinking about how they should approach the rollout of the new iPad Pro, Apple’s thinnest and most powerful iPad to date. Myhren, whose job it is to help sell the products of one of the world’s most profitable and beloved gadget makers, zeroed in on an idea. “The idea was about the thinnest product we have ever made, and in the making of it, all I could see was thin, thin, thin,” Myhren says. The team ended up releasing a spot in May 2024 called “Crush.” It depicted a collection of creative tools—turntables, a piano, trumpet, cans of paint, a sculptured bust, an old arcade game, a mannequin for fashion design, a writing desk, camera lenses—all piled up in an industrial compactor. Then, to the melancholy tune of Sonny & Cher’s “All I Ever Need Is You,” the objects were slowly and methodically crushed into the iPad Pro. The ad bombed. It went viral for all the wrong reasons, and exposed a major blind spot for Apple. “Crush” aired in the early days of the AI hype cycle, and the ad fueled fears that new technological capabilities would replace creative professionals of all stripes and lead to massive job losses. Barely 48 hours later, Myhren publicly apologized for the spot and it was pulled. “When the world saw something other than what we intended in it, it was impossible to unsee,” Myhren recalls. Apple isn’t ac