This is a “What was Apple Thinking?” moment: one of the company’s billboards in Italy shows a toddler holding an iPhone with a slogan “Everything is ok, it’s iPhone.”
The Guarantor The Authority for Childhood and Adolescents, a children’s rights watchdog, is referring the ad to three regulators for review, according to a Garatein Fanzia report. Marina Terragni of the watchdog had this to say (via translation from the Italian site: While all over the world people have been thinking about the minimum age of access to digital for some time, this advertising seems to go in a completely different direction, normalizing what unfortunately happens to see with worrying frequency: even very young children being entrusted to electronic baby-sitting, the starting point of a possible addiction with serious consequences on their psychological and cognitive development.
I hope you’ll help support Apple World Today by becoming a patron. Almost all our income is from Patreon support and sponsored posts. Patreon pricing ranges from $2 to $10 a month. Thanks in advance for your support.
In the other adverts in the set, the iPhone is in danger from something, rain, mud, a dog etc. The implication in all of them was that the phone will survive this mistreatment. It seems pretty clear that is what they were thinking when they showed a kid holding the phone potentially breaking it. They didn’t consider the baby-sitting aspect. Now that other people have read that meaning into it, it does seem obvious it was a bad choice.