“I was privileged to work on what’s been called the best TV commercial ever, Apple Computer’s “1984,” which launched the Macintosh personal computer. It ran only once on the Super Bowl (in 1984, of course), but established that venue as the platform for big, new branding campaigns from all sorts of advertisers—beer, cars, soft drinks, dot-coms, you name it,” Steve Hayden reports for AdWeek.
Hayden reports, “The brief for ‘1984’ was simple: Steve Jobs said, ‘I want to stop the world in its tracks.'”
“But some myth busting is in order. The myth is that “1984” only ran once anywhere and then earned an additional $150 million in media value being replayed as the subject of commentary on ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC and CBC. But the truth is, we ran a 30-second version of ‘1984’ in the top 10 U.S. markets, plus, in an admittedly childish move, in an 11th market—Boca Raton, Fla., headquarters for IBM’s PC division. That only the Super Bowl version is remembered gives you an idea of the importance of the right media buy—and the power of a 60- vs. 30-second spot,” Hayden reports. “‘1984’ also ran in theaters through ScreenVision. One theater owner was so enamored with it, he ran it for a month after the buy was over.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
“1984” – Apple Computer, Inc.
And recently the 1984 ad by Apple is being plagiarized by the likes of Coca-Cola, and, to my knowledge, a bank and an internet provider.
And, I might add, they are utterly annoying, i.e., poor copies, advertisement-wise.
Little did Steve know how much like the big brother on the screen Apple would eventually become… What happened to the Apple of yesterday, we want you back!
Utterly annoying poor copies, in the rich tradition of all those who try to copy apple.
@Joe
Get a grip!
Uh, Joe . . . . 300,000 apps — thousands of them pretty damn innovative — isn’t exactly what IBM had in mind in the early 1980’s.
You know, Joe, I dearly loved the Apple of yesterday, I got my first Mac in 1987. But I love the Apple of today more.
You are free to buy and use any product alternative to Apple’s. You are not pressured or forced by employers or governments to use Apple. The company’s grip on its market is simply the brilliance of its hardware and software experience. Any restrictions on developers, etc, is merely and necessarily to keep from polluting that experience.
Please, by all means, buy something else.
An excellent coverage of the “making of” 1984 can be seen at http://www.curtsmedia.com/cine/1984.html, complete with the rarely seen 30 sec spot, a short behind the scenes video and full transcript of Big Brother’s speech. Enjoy!
It actually ran twice. Apple wanted it to be up for an award for best commercial of the year in 1983. They were worried that it would be forgotten by the time the 1984 awards occurred (because they had no idea if it would be a success or not). So they ran it in a small town in Idaho at 2 or 3 in the morning – just once – to qualify.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)
Thanks MDN, seeing that reminds me why Apple is Apple. Mac, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, what-ever-is-next…
They don’t just copy the competition, they invent their own category.
@Joe, troll much?
Joe,
Yeah…I’m sure we’ll miss you… and don’t let the screen-door hit you on the way out.
You know what is funny, I have found that most windows proponents don’t know anything else, and so their loyalty is both unconscious and by definition unfounded. While conversely most mac owners have used both (most currently use both) win and OS X and made a conscious choice .
Check this out:
Although the implied target of the spot was IBM, the text of the Big Brother speech neatly fits the predatory attitudes and behaviors of what was to became the gray monomorphic oppressor of computing: microsoft.
It came almost two decades later, but the stream of new Apple products devised after the return of Steve Jobs, smashed the nearly-complete microsoft monopoly nightmare.
Some of you guys are blinded by your passion for Apple, it’s obvious that Apple is turning into the subject of the 1984 commercial. Face Time runs through a central server and soon to be Super Farm.
If a school board can spy on students at their homes without them knowing then what do you think Big brother can doing with your web cam.
Yes I trust Apple today but Steve won’t be around forever.
Dedicated Mac user since OS7
From the link that GQ sent:
“Six months before we knew about Mac, we had this new ad that read, “Why 1984 won’t be like 1984,” reveals Lee Clow, creative director at Chiat/Day. “It explained Apple’s philosophy and purpose; that people, not just government and big corporations, should run technology. If computers aren’t to take over our lives, they have to be accessible.”
@Joe – do you think iPod, iPhone, and iPad have made the use of technology less accessible to the people? You’re mistaking the control of what goes on under the hood of their products, for the betterment of that system, from control of what you can do with those systems. Which, BTW, is how Apple has always been under Steve Jobs. If you are longing for the mid-1990’s licensing our era of Apple, then I really don’t know what to tell you.
There are those who don’t get it. Apple hasn’t become the 1984 enemy. Apple isn’t trying to flood the market with “me-too” clones. Apple has been inventing, innovating like they did in the early beginning. IBM isn’t the same IBM in 1984. Today’s 1984 IBM is actually a list:
1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Motorola
4. HTC
5. Samsung
6. (insert more here)
The list grows. It also grows with analysts, other CEO’s taking a jab at Apple because they are jealous- like IBM was back in the 1980’s. Companies didn’t make PC’s because they had something better. They did it to counter Apple much like companies are countering Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and Apps today.
They and others call Apple the new 1984. Apple hasn’t changed. Apple is simply creating products that work and work really well. It is the people that choose to make Apple successful. Apple makes things that are a benefit to people. It is part of the overall eco-system that some people hate.
The ad was a fart in the wind when it aired and has been hugely overhyped since by legions of Mac worshippers. Even today it is virtually unknown outside of Mac devotees. If it hadn’t won an award, nobody would have noticed. Few viewers understood the occluded references in the ad or even cared why “1984 wouldn’t be like 1984”. The ad didn’t show the Mac, what made it so great, desirable, or even spurn much interest to find out. The consumer market it was targeted for was utterly missed and the Mac ended up being adopted almost purely by printers and educators, leaving the consumer market rife for a Windows siege a decade later. I’m mostly surprised it ever got to air.
Brau:
Dude… what color is the air in your world?
Well you can not forget DOUBLE LINKS attempt of using this format too. They use a Steve Jobs looking Big Brother and some anime drawn lady to do the mallet thing. Show how Steve back then was a creative genius that other only can do is follow.
@Joe
Awwww. Joe misses his ADB ports and 700kb discs.
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@Snapper,
I think your concerns are misplaced.
It’s the CIA / NSA we need to be concerned about, not Apple.
I was selling computers for the Byte Shop in Seattle at the time and we had a Super Bowl party as much for the 1984 Commercial as for the game itself.
See Topo and me in CompuKids from 1984. I ran Topo the Robot and appear in the Art segment at about 20 minutes in.
http://homepage.mac.com/citizenx1/iMovieTheater45.html
@Brau:
You mean “ripe.” not “rife” in that context. I’m not sure what you mean where you use the word “spurn.” “Stir,” perhaps.
You are thoroughly wrong about the ad. What happened to Apple was the scheming by Sculley and the board to fire Jobs in 1985, then the naive agreement Sculley made with Gates to license the Mac GUI to msft. So the target wasn’t utterly missed, it was hit bullseye with the mediocre copy called windows, exploiting that license plus the ubiquitous platform which IBM had unwittingly given msft. Then for over a decade, clueless Apple leadership was kept afloat by brilliant engineers. With the return of Jobs, the promise of the commercial is now being realized.
…”If it hadn’t won an award, nobody would have noticed. “
Brau, you probably weren’t there. Even though the commercial aired exactly once (notwithstanding the Twin Falls, Idaho airing in the middle of the night, a month earlier), it was repeated by news media throughout the following week, due to its so radically different approach. Everyone was talking about the commercial. As Jobs said about it, the commercial and its aftermath created a huge information vacuum (meaning, people were talking about the commercial and wanted to know what it was all about), so Apple bough 40 pages of Newsweek to insert a booklet about the Macintosh.
In the history of advertising, experts tend to agree, the “1984” spot and its aftermath are considered the most effective campaigns ever.
We all know how Apple lost and Microsoft won the desktop wars. Jobs was fired from Apple, and it all went downhill from there… until he came back.
@Brau
It certainly was award winning. Look around. Everyone today is using a Mac. Admittedly a lot of them are not made by Apple and are running a knock-off OS, but that ad was the start of selling the computer paradigm that took over in 1995. Hardly a “fart in the wind”. (and it started the trend of companies kicking off a sales campaign with a big splash ad in the SuperBowl, another example of Apple leading the way)