Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [57]
Klein fiddled with a pen. “You need something like that for ads but you have the luxury when you’re dealing with the press of being able to talk in paragraphs. You don’t have to use just two words. The press is increasingly sophisticated but the audience isn’t necessarily so. The whole point of talking to the press is to educate them so they can educate their readers. For each publication you change a little bit of what you’ve got to say. Each publication looks a bit different and will ask different things. Business Week will want something different from Time.”’
The door opened and Steve Jobs, looking disheveled and grumpy, strolled in, flopped into a chair, and slung his feet onto the table. He was dressed in jeans, argyle socks, a navy shirt, and loafers. Somebody had just told him that an MIT professor had been describing the features of Lisa and Mac on a Cable News Network program. Jobs was annoyed and turned to Klein. “I bet it was Marvin Minsky. That’s the only person it could be. Get a tape and if it was Minsky I want to string him up by his toenails.”
Murray and Klein continued to debate various approaches for the press until Jobs cut them short. “We ought to decide what we want and then start to cultivate something because I’ve got a feeling we’ll get what we want.” He continued, “What we need is a cover of Time or Newsweek. I can see the cover as a shot of the whole Mac team. We’ve got a better shot at Newsweek than Time,” he predicted. “We had lunch with the president of Newsweek and a bunch of editors in some room at the top of the building and they stayed and talked for a couple of hours after lunch. It just went on and on. Technology. Reindustrialization. All that stuff.” He nodded to himself. “They’ll really go for that. ‘New computers from hi-tech kids’ and all that.”
“I can see the story now,” Murray said. “It will have a dozen pictures inside with little bios underneath.”
“Then we could do with an hour long TV special with Cavett interviewing Burrell and Andy,” Jobs said.
“We need something more popular than that,” Klein objected.
“Johnny Carson or something like that,” Murray suggested.
“Johnny Carson wouldn’t be bad,” Jobs said.
“What about that British guy who did the Nixon interviews?” Murray asked.
“Once it starts to happen, it snowballs,” Jobs said. “I can see People magazine coming down and putting Andy Hertzfeld on the cover. We can create a mini-fame for each of these people. It’ll be a gas. We’ll have stories that say ‘Here’s the guy that designed it,’ ‘Here’s the factory that built it.’ People will just keep hearing all about it. We’ve got to get a lot of free editorial.”
Jobs spotted a dummy advert lying on the table. “Ooooh, I like that,” he said in a softer voice. “Ooooh, that would be hot.” He read the slogan: “APPLE COMPUTER DOES IT AGAIN. I like that. That’s really hot.”
“It’d be a nice cover for Newsweek” Murray volunteered.
“It would be nice for Byte” Jobs countered as his mood improved. “It’s look so different from IBM.”
“Its too classy for Byte,” Klein objected.
“It’d be great for Newsweek,” Jobs agreed. “They’d sell millions of them.”
The conversation returned to the problems of creating an image for a computer. Jobs sighed, “You know the closest thing has been Charlie Chaplin. IBM has really given their computer personality.” He paused. “I’ve got this idea for an ad. We’ll have a sort of spastic Charlie Chaplin but he’s constructed so he’s not real funny and we could do it because IBM cannot trademark Charlie Chaplin. Then Mac Man drifts in and scrunches Chaplin, or walks all over him, or comes out in front of him and shoots arrows at him from inside his coat.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Then it says, ‘Charlie Chaplin meets Mr. Mac.’”
Murray and Klein smiled and said nothing. Jobs continued, “We need ads that hit you in the face. They’ve got to have visually high bandwidth. We have an opportunity to do an ad that doesn’t talk about product. It’s like we’re so good we don’t have to show photographs of computers.”
“In advertising,” Murray