Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [50]
Apple’s obsessive secrecy is not a quirk of Jobs’s control-freak tendencies; it’s a key element of Apple’s extremely effective marketing machine. Apple makes millions of dollars in free advertising every time Jobs steps onto a stage to reveal a new product. Many have wondered why there are no bloggers at Apple. It’s because loose lips at Apple sink ships. But there are dozens of bloggers at Pixar, and there were even before Jobs sold Pixar to Disney. Pixar bloggers happily gossip about all aspects of the company’s projects and their work lives. The difference is that Pixar’s movies don’t rely on a surprise unveiling to get press. New movies are routinely reported in the Hollywood trade press. Jobs isn’t a control freak for the sake of it; there’s a method to his madness. A new product isn’t news unless it’s new. Secrecy maintains the element of surprise.
Personality Plus
As well as introducing cool products, Jobs has been very successful at creating a persona for Apple. Through advertising, he has developed an image of the things he, and Apple, stand for. In the late 1970s, it was revolution through technology. Later it was about being creative, thinking different. Jobs’s personality allows Apple to market itself as human, and cool. His personality is the raw material of Apple’s advertising. Even an agency like Chiat\Day could never ever make Bill Gates look cool.
Apple’s advertising has done a good job of conveying the company as an icon of change, of revolution, and of bold thinking. But it does so in a subtle, indirect way. Apple rarely brags. It never says, “We’re revolutionary. Really.” It uses the storytelling of its advertising to convey this message, often as a subtext.
Take the iPod silhouette ads. The imagery of the campaign was fresh and new; it didn’t look like anything that had come before. “They always have this freshness in graphic design. The look is very simple and very iconic. It’s so distinctive that it has a look to itself,” advertising journalist Warren Berger, author of Advertising Today and Hoopla, told me in a telephone interview. 25
Berger said the best way to get creative advertising is to hire the most creative agency. Chiat\Day is one of a handful of the most creative agencies in the world, but the real trick is to communicate what the brand is about. “Lee Clow and Jobs understood each other so well, they became buddies,” said Berger. “Clow really got the culture of Apple, the mind-set. He really understood what they were trying to do. And Jobs gave Clow total creative freedom. He allowed Clow to show him anything no matter how crazy it might seem. It really allows people to push the boundaries. IBM could never do that. They would never give Chiat\Day the freedom that Jobs gave them.”
In 2006, Hewlett-Packard started to do very good advertising, with campaigns that featured people, not computers, in spots that looked like they may have come from Apple. In one of HP’s “The Computer Is Personal Again” TV spots, the hip-hop star Jay Z shows viewers the contents of his computer, which is conjured up as a 3-D special effect between his gesticulating hands. His face is never shown.
Hewlett-Packard had hired Goodby Silverstein, another superstar agency. The ads were interesting and very well done, but they never had the strength of personality of Apple’s ads, because the company doesn’t have the strength of personality. No matter how the ads tried to personalize HP the corporation through celebrities like Jay Z, it still felt like a company. Apple is more of a phenomenon than a company. Hewlett-Packard can never be quite as magical because it doesn’t have a personality. The same thing happened to Apple when Jobs left in 1985. “When Steve left, Apple became a company again,” said Berger.
“The advertising was good, but it didn’t have that magic. It didn’t look like the same company. It wasn’t a phenomenon. It didn’t feel like a revolution. It was just trying to stabilize things.” Apple faces the same danger after Jobs leaves. It will have trouble finding a replacement persona to represent the