Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [47]
The Pepsi commercials were treated like miniature movies, shot with the highest production values by Hollywood filmmakers. When other companies were spending $15,000 to shoot a commercial, Pepsi spent between $200,000 and $300,000 for a single spot.22
Jobs does exactly the same thing at Apple today. Apple is famous for its lifestyle advertising. It never loads its ads with speeds and feeds, functions and features, like everyone else. Instead, Apple engages in lifestyle marketing. It portrays hip young people with “enviable lifestyles,” given to them courtesy of Apple’s products. The company’s highly successful iPod ad campaign shows young people grooving to the music in their heads. There is never any mention of the iPod’s hard-drive capacity.
Sculley also perfected the art of putting on a big splashy marketing event and persuading the media to treat it as news. Jobs’s famous keynote presentations at Macworld, for example, where he often introduces products, have their roots in Sculley’s “Pepsi Challenge” campaigns from the seventies. To take on his rival, Coke, Sculley dreamed up the “Pepsi Challenge”—a blind taste test that pitted Pepsi against Coke, staged at grocery stores, malls, and big sports events. These challenges often caused such a splash that they would attract local TV crews. It was immediately obvious that a spot on the local TV news that evening was worth far more than any thirty-second commercial the company could pay for. Sculley upped the stakes, organizing celebrity challenges at big sports games that would often garner massive publicity. “Marketing, after all, is really theater,” Sculley wrote. “It’s like staging a performance. The way to motivate people is to get them interested in your product, to entertain them, and to turn your product into an incredibly important event. The Pepsi Generation campaign did all this in scaling Pepsi to epic proportions and making a brand bigger than life.”23
One More Thing: Coordinated Marketing Campaigns
Jobs uses essentially the same technique of treating marketing events as “news theater” to introduce new products at the annual Macworld Expo. He has turned his trademark “one more thing” keynote speeches at Macworld and special product presentations into massive media events. Apple had six special product presentations in 2006 and seven in 2007. They are marketing theater, staged for the world’s press.
Jobs’s product presentations are also integrated into big, coordinated advertising campaigns that are executed with a precision that would impress a general. The campaigns combine rumor and surprise with traditional marketing, and rely wholeheartedly on secrecy for their effectiveness. On the outside it can look somewhat chaotic and uncontrolled, but they are tightly planned and coordinated. Here’s how it works.
A few days ahead of a product presentation, Apple’s PR department sends out invitations to the press and VIPs. The invitation gives the time and location of a “special event” but contains scant information about its nature or any upcoming products that might be revealed. It’s a tease. Jobs is effectively saying, “I’ve got a secret; guess what it is.”
Immediately, tongues start wagging. There’ll be an explosion of blog posts and press articles speculating on what Jobs will announce. In years past, the speculation was limited to specialist Apple websites and fan forums, but more recently the mainstream press also reports the rumors. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNN, and the International Herald Tribune have all written breathless articles looking forward to Jobs’s product presentations. The rumormongering surrounding Macworld 2007—where Jobs introduced the iPhone—even made the nightly news on all the cable and TV networks, which is unheard of for any company in any industry. Not even Hollywood can garner as much attention for its movie premieres.
This kind of worldwide publicity is worth many hundreds of millions of dollars in free exposure. The launch of the iPhone in January 2007 was the biggest to