Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [45]
The campaign came together very quickly and featured a series of black-and-white photos of about forty famous iconoclasts, including Muhammad Ali, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Maria Callas, Cesar Chavez, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jim Henson, Alfred Hitchcock, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Picasso, Jackie Robinson, Jerry Seinfeld, Ted Turner, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Apple ran the ads in magazines and on billboards, and aired a TV ad celebrating “the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers . . . the crazy ones.”
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do,” the ad proclaimed.
The commercial came at a critical time in Apple’s history. The company needed a public statement of its values and its mission—as much for its employees as for its customers. The “Think Different” campaign trumpeted Apple’s virtues: its creativity, its uniqueness, and its ambitions. Again, it was a big, bold statement—Apple was associating itself, and its users, with some of humankind’s most celebrated leaders, thinkers, and artists.
The photos were run without identifying labels, a strategy previously used by the agency for a 1984 Nike campaign featuring famous athletes. The lack of labels challenged the viewer to figure out who the subject was. This strategy makes the ads inclusive and involving. It rewarded those in the know. If you knew whom the ad featured, it saluted you as an insider, part of the cognoscenti. It worked like a charm. People delighted in identifying the subjects of the ads, and they collected campaign posters for their bedroom walls and offices.
Jobs was involved from the beginning, submitting personal heroes like Buckminster Fuller and Ansel Adams. He also used his extensive contacts and formidable persuasive powers to secure permissions from the likes of Yoko Ono and the estate of Albert Einstein. But Jobs declined the agency’s suggestion to feature him in one of the ads.
Out-Advertise the Competition
One of the things that has always distinguished Apple is its advertising. Advertising is extremely important to Jobs, second only to the technology. His long-stated ambition is to make computers accessible to all, which to him means they have to be advertised to the public. Advertising is a key part of Apple’s communication with its customers. “My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company,” he said in Apple’s early days.19 Jobs is immensely proud of Apple’s advertising. He often debuts new ads during his Macworld keynote speeches. If he’s giving a product presentation, there’s usually an ad to accompany the new product, and Jobs always shows it off to the public. If the ad is particularly good, he’ll show it twice, obviously delighted.
More than anyone else in the PC industry, Jobs has strived to create a unique, non-nerdy image for computers. In the late 1970s, he hired Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley advertising pioneer, to help make Apple’s early machines appeal to ordinary consumers. The advertising had to communicate to consumers why they needed one of these new PCs. There was no inherent demand for home computers; the ads would have to create it. McKenna drafted colorful ads showing computers in domestic settings. The ads were written in simple, easy-to-understand language, with none of the technical jargon that dominated the ads of competitors, who, after all, were trying to appeal to a completely different market—hobbyists.
The first magazine ad for the Apple II shows a preppy young man playing with the machine on a kitchen table, while his wife, washing the dishes, looks on adoringly. The ad’s sexual politics may have been old-fashioned, but it conveyed a message that Apple’s PCs were useful, utilitarian machines. The kitchen setting