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I'm with you on these ads. I find them quite silly. They remind me of the "Cola War" ads which were lame to say the least. I still think the best promotion was the "Think Different" ads. Read excert below. They were clever. They came out in 1997 and a head of there time. They still hold up today. I lived and worked in Sydney working in Advertising for 18 years and when theses ads came out people in that industry and the general MAC public breathed a breathe of fresh air. This was the re-launch of Apple and it was very well received. I remember waiting for a train and a 16 year old boy was taking down one of the posters and rolling it up. I asked him what he was doing. His replay was "These ads are cool and MAC's rule" What can I say.
New Marketing Strategy
Lee Clow Jobs invited three ad agency reps to present new ideas. Lee Clow, now the creative director for Chiat/Day, was one of them. On August 3, 1997, he presented a new slogan and aesthetic for Apple's ads: Think Different (perhaps a reference to IBM's famous "THINK" slogan) and montages of artists and creative professionals using the Mac. In an interview with Electric Escape, Clow said that he wanted to feature filmmakers at Dreamworks SKG working on their Macs.
Jobs was enamored with the concept, though now using anonymous figures. And instead of Dreamworks filmmakers, he wanted to use celebrities and thinkers.
Jobs had long been a fan of black and white portraits and prints. NeXT's offices were decorated (expensively) with poster-sized prints from Ansel Adams, and Jobs' manse in Los Gatos was decorated with black and white portraits of his heroes, including Albert Einstein. He began brainstorming on the spot. Chiat/Day was reinstated as the chief advertising agency, and Lee Clow became a regular presence on the Apple campus.
Although the ad was produced entirely by Chiat/Day staff (on Macs, of course), Jobs (sometimes with marketing staffers) reviewed revisions at every step of the process. He used a satellite uplink between City Center 3 and Chiat/Day's Venice offices to review the clips in full video instead of relying on the mail or compressed files.
The Creative Process
Creating the Think Different adsChiat/Day used a totally computer based creative environment. Jobs gave the group 17 days after approval to complete the entire campaign. That included the television commercial and billboards for major markets such as Los Angeles and New York.
An ordinary campaign for a more obscure client (or even Apple under Amelio) would have taken much longer just to get rights to the images. Jobs was particularly useful when Clow and his team needed to get usage rights from celebrities including Joan Baez (Jobs' ex-girlfriend) and Yoko Ono (once a neighbor near Central Park when Jobs lived in the San Remo and Yoko in the Dakota).
If Clow had approached these people's publicists, he would be another adman. When Jobs called, he was a friend and a cult-figure in computer history.
The television commercial was produced using an Avid 4000 system on a Macintosh with Adobe AfterEffects. Jennifer Gulab, who worked on the television commercial, worked very closely with Jobs via satellite link. The two were in contact daily, working out which images would be used (a choice largely based on the availability of images and permissions), the music, and the narration, which was done by Richard Dreyfus.
Heres' to the crazy ones....Dreyfus read a free-verse poem, "Here's to the Crazy Ones", written by a Chiat/Day copywriter, Craig Tanimoto. This was used extensively throughout the entire campaign.
The first rule of the campaign was that there would be no products in the ads. Clow and the rest of the creative team were very concerned with appearing to exploit the artists who's images they used. Instead of being paid, all of the participants (or their estates) were given money and computer equipment to be donated to the charities or non-profits of their choice.
Think Different imagesThe print and billboard ads were also unique. Instead of sticking to Mac and general computing magazines, Apple bought space in popular magazines and fashion magazines. Outside advertisements were practically unheard of in the computer industry, but Chiat/Day rented hundreds of major spaces in New York and Los Angeles - and still does.
Since they had little time, instead of making full scale replicas of posters for bus stations or billboards in major cities, Jessica Schulman just imposed her mockups onto street scenes to give her colleagues an idea how her designs would look. She also collaborated with Jobs, exchanging images on the Internet and making constant revisions.
Reaction
The campaign debuted on September 28, 1997 and was remarkably popular. Unlike some of Apple's earlier major campaigns (like the "Power to be your best"), it received glowing press writeups.
The new campaign was a turning point for Apple. On September 30, two days after the debut, Jobs threw a party for Apple employees at his Palo Alto home where he talked about the campaign and Apple's future in general. It began as a critique of Think Different but eventually turned into a rousing pep rally for Apple's image: "our brand is the most - or at least one of the most - valuable things we have going for us now" (DaveNet) and the company's future in general. It "only took 15 . . . 30 . . . maybe 60 seconds" to reestablish Apple's counter-culture image that it had lost during the 90s (DaveNet).
The ads won a slew of awards and developed a cult-following. After the first campaign, Apple started sending complimentary posters to public schools across the nation featuring different celebrities (including Pablo Picasso, Jane Goodall, and Ron Howard) to hang in classrooms. The complete packets now sell for hundreds of dollars on some websites.
Apple maintained the campaign until 2002, and some of the early Apple retail stores featured Think Different tableaus and "Here's to the Crazy Ones" on the walls before Apple moved to Switch.
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