Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [44]
The spot began with a tag line taken from another, discarded ad the agency was working on at the time: “Why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’”—a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel. It was too good a line to just throw away, so the agency pitched it to Apple. And, of course, it was perfectly suited for the launch of the Mac. The agency hired British director Ridley Scott, who’d just finished filming Blade Runner, to film the ad on a London soundstage. Using a cast of British skinheads, Scott portrayed a bleak Orwellian future, in which a Big Brother squawking propaganda from a giant TV cows the masses into submission. Suddenly, in rushes an athletic woman in a Macintosh T-shirt, who smashes the screen with the toss of a sledgehammer. The sixty-second spot never showed the Mac, nor any computer, but the message was clear: the Mac would free downtrodden computer users from the hegemony of IBM.
Apple’s board of directors was shown the spot just a week before it was due to air and freaked out. They ordered the ad pulled from the Super Bowl, but Chiat\Day was unable to sell the slot in time and the ad ran.
It turned out to be fortuitous: the ad garnered more attention and more press than the game itself. Although it was shown only twice (during the Super Bowl and earlier, on an obscure TV station in the middle of the night to make it eligible for advertising awards), the ad was rebroadcast in countless news reports and on Entertainment Tonight. Apple estimated that more than 43 million people saw the ad on the news, which was worth millions of dollars in free advertising, according to an estimate by John Sculley.
“The commercial changed advertising; the product changed the ad business; the technology changed the world,” wrote Advertising Age columnist Bradley Johnson in a 1994 retrospective. “It turned the Super Bowl from a football game into advertising’s Super Event of the year and it ushered in the era of advertising as news.”16
The “1984” ad is typical of Jobs. It was bold and brash, and unlike any other commercial of its time. Instead of a straightforward product presentation, “1984” was a mini-movie with characters, a narrative, and high production values. Jobs didn’t think of it, write it, or direct it, but he was smart enough to team up with Lee Clow and Jay Chiat, and give them the room to be creative.
The “1984” ad went on to win at least thirty-five awards for Chiat\Day, including the Grand Prix at Cannes, and generated millions of dollars in new commissions and clients. It also ushered in an era of lifestyle advertising that downplayed a product’s features in favor of its appeal. No one else was thinking about advertising in the same way, especially in the computer industry; and very few companies were willing to communicate with the public in such an original, unorthodox manner. Jobs left Apple in 1985 and the company switched agencies not long after his departure. But when Jobs returned in 1996, he brought back the agency to create a campaign that would “refocus” Apple.
“Think Different”
Jobs was concerned about Apple’s lack of focus. He wanted an ad that would remind the world—and Apple itself—what its core values were. Jobs asked Chiat\Day to create a campaign that would speak to those core values. “They asked us to come in and talk about what Apple needed to do to get its focus back,” Clow said. “It really wasn’t hard; it was just to go back to Apple’s roots.”17
Clow, who’s habitually dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, said the idea for “Think Different” came from thinking about the Mac user base—the designers, artists, and creatives who remained loyal customers through the company’s darkest days. “Everybody immediately embraced the idea that this campaign should be about being creative and thinking out of the box,” Clow said. “It got bigger when we said