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  • PowerBook Advertising with Steve Wozniak

    Advertising in Forbes magazine
    Advertising in Forbes magazine

  • “1984″ – The famous Super Bowl Spot

    The most famous Super Bowl ad

    „1984“ is an American television commercial which introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer for the first time. It was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas and Lee Clow at Chiat/Day, Venice, produced by New York production company Fairbanks Films, and directed by Ridley Scott. Anya Major performed as the unnamed heroine and David Graham as Big Brother.

    Its only U.S. daytime televised broadcast was on January 22, 1984 during and as part of the telecast of the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII. Chiat/Day also ran the ad one other time on television, in December 1983 right before the 1:00 am sign-off on KMVT in Twin Falls, Idaho, so that the advertisement could be submitted to award ceremonies for that year.

    In addition, starting on January 17, 1984 it was screened prior to previews in movie theaters for a few weeks. It has since been seen on television commercial compilation specials, as well as in „Retro-mercials“ on TV Land. The estate of George Orwell and the television rightsholder to the novel 1984 considered the commercial to be a flagrant copyright infringement, and sent a cease-and-desist letter to Apple and Chiat/Day in April 1984. The commercial was never televised as a commercial after that.

    In one interpretation of the commercial, „1984“ used the unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by her white tank top with a cubist picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer on it) as a means of saving humanity from „conformity“ (Big Brother). These images were an allusion to George Orwell’s noted novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised „Big Brother“. The rows of marching minions have direct cinematic parallels with those in the opening scenes of the classic dystopian film Metropolis.

    Originally a subject of contention within Apple, it has nevertheless consistently been lauded as a classic, winning critical acclaim over time. It is now considered a watershed event and a masterpiece in advertising, and is widely regarded as one of the most memorable and successful American television commercials of all time.
    The commercial was rebroadcast in an updated version in 2004 on its 20th anniversary, with the heroine modified to be listening to an iPod. Viewers generally saw the Big Brother target of the Apple advertisement as being Microsoft, with the original villain, IBM, being all but forgotten.

    Making of the Apple Ad 1984
    Making of the Apple Ad 1984

    Plot

    The commercial opens with a dystopic, industrial setting in blue and gray tones, showing a line of people (of ambiguous gender) marching in unison through a long tunnel monitored by a string of telescreens. This is in sharp contrast to the full-color shots of the nameless runner (Anya Major). She looks like an Olympic track and field athlete, as she is carrying a large brass-headed hammer and is wearing an athletic „uniform“ (bright orange athletic shorts, running shoes, a white tank top with a cubist picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer, a white sweat band on her left wrist, and a red one on her right).

    As she is chased by four police officers (presumably agents of the Thought Police) wearing black uniforms, protected by riot gear, helmets with visors covering their faces, and armed with large night sticks, she races towards a large screen with the image of a Big Brother-like figure (David Graham, also seen on the telescreens earlier) giving a speech:

    My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

    The runner, now close to the screen, hurls the hammer towards it, right at the moment Big Brother announces, „we shall prevail!“ In a flurry of light and smoke, the screen is destroyed, shocking the people watching the screen.
    The commercial concludes with a portentous voiceover, accompanied by scrolling black text (in Apple’s early signature „Garamond“ font); the hazy, whitish-blue aftermath of the cataclysmic event serves as the background. It reads:

    On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like „1984.

    The screen fades to black as the voiceover ends, and the rainbow Apple logo appears.

    Production

    Development

    The commercial was created by the advertising agency Chiat/Day, Venice, with copy by Steve Hayden, art direction by Brent Thomas and creative direction by Lee Clow. Ridley Scott (whose dystopian sci-fi film, Blade Runner was released two years prior) was hired by agency producer Richard O’Neill to direct it, with a then-„unheard-of production budget of $900,000.“ The actors who appeared in the commercial were paid $25 per day.

    The copywriter of the ad was Steve Hayden. At the time he worked for Chiat/Day, the company that produced the spot. He’s now vice-chairman at Ogilvy and Mather. NPR’s Liane Hansen spoke with Hayden about the ad’s impact:

    [jwplayer mediaid=“2265″]

    Steve Jobs and John Sculley were so enthusiastic about the final product that they „…purchased one and a half minutes of ad time for the Super Bowl, annually the most-watched television program in America. In December 1983 they screened the commercial for the Apple Board of Directors. To Jobs‘ and Sculley’s surprise, the entire board hated the commercial.“ However, Scully himself got „cold feet“ and asked Chiat/Day to sell off the two commercial spots.
    Despite the board’s dislike of the film, Steve Jobs continued to support it. Steve Wozniak watched it and offered to pay for half of the spot personally if the board refused to air it.

    Of the original ninety seconds booked, Chiat/Day managed to resell thirty seconds to another advertiser, leaving the other sixty second slot.

    Intended message

    Adelia Cellini states in a 2004 article for MacWorld, „The Story Behind Apple’s ‚1984‘ TV Commercial„:

    Let’s see – an all-powerful entity blathering on about Unification of Thoughts to an army of soulless drones, only to be brought down by a plucky, Apple-esque underdog. So Big Brother, the villain from Apple’s ‚1984‘ Mac ad, represented IBM, right? According to the ad’s creators, that’s not exactly the case. The original concept was to show the fight for the control of computer technology as a struggle of the few against the many, says TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Lee Clow. Apple wanted the Mac to symbolize the idea of empowerment, with the ad showcasing the Mac as a tool for combating conformity and asserting originality. What better way to do that than have a striking blonde athlete take a sledghammer to the face of that ultimate symbol of conformity, Big Brother?

    However, in his 1983 Apple keynote address, Steve Jobs made the following comment before showcasing a preview of the commercial to a select audience:

    It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future. They are increasing and desperately turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?

    Reception

    Awards

    * 2007: Best Super Bowl Spot (in the game’s 40-year history)

    * 1999: TV Guide – Number One Greatest Commercial of All Time

    * 1995: Advertising Age – Greatest Commercial

    * 1984: 31st Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival – Grand Prix

    Social impact

    Ted Friedman, in his 2005 text, Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture, notes the impact of the commercial:

    Super Bowl viewers were overwhelmed by the startling ad. The ad garnered millions of dollars worth of free publicity, as news programs rebroadcast it that night. It was quickly hailed by many in the advertising industry as a masterwork. Advertising Age named it the 1980s Commercial of the Decade, and it continues to rank high on lists of the most influential commercials of all time […] 1984 was never broadcast again, adding to its mystique.

    1984 became a signature representation of Apple computers. It was scripted as a thematic element in the 1999 docudrama, Pirates of Silicon Valley, which explores the rise of Apple and Microsoft (the film opens and closes with references to the commercial including a re-enactment of the heroine running towards the screen of Big Brother and clips of the original commercial).

    „1984“ became a signature representation of Apple computers. It was scripted as a thematic element in the 1999 docudrama, Pirates of Silicon Valley, which explores the rise of Apple and Microsoft (the film opens and closes with references to the commercial including a re-enactment of the heroine running towards the screen of Big Brother and clips of the original commercial). The „1984“ ad was also prominent in the 20th anniversary celebration of the Macintosh in 2004, as Apple reposted a new version of the ad on its website. In this updated version, an iPod, complete with signature white earbuds, was digitally added to the heroine. Attendees were given a poster showing the heroine with iPod as a commemorative gift.

    Influence in media

    A commercial for the video game Half-Life 2 was based on this commercial. A parody of the commercial is seen in the Futurama episode Future Stock, promoting Planet Express. Another parody appears in The Simpsons TV show episode Mypods and Boomsticks, featuring Steve Jobs as „Big Brother“ and the Comic Book Guy as the runner.

    For the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh, Apple re-released the ad with the runner wearing an iPod.

    Further reading

    Source:

    1984 (advertisement). (2012, May 13). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:12, June 2, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1984_(advertisement)&oldid=492407781

    A Look Back at Apple's Super Ad : NPR.

    This article is licenced under the GNU Free Documentation License

  • TIME’s Steve Jobs Covers

    A gallery of TIME’s coverage of Apple and its visionary leader.

    [portfolio_slideshow]

  • 20th Anniversary Macintosh Promo

    The young Jonathan Ive discusses the 20th Anniversary Macintosh:

  • Steve Jobs introduces the Think Different campaign (1997)

    In the video embedded below, the Apple CEO introduces the company’s 1997 Think Different campaign. A key quote:

    [Our new ad campaign] honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living, some of them are not. But the ones that aren’t–you know that if they ever used a computer, it would have been a Mac.

    And another:

    This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance…to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.

    And this is the TV spot:

  • The secret to Apple’s Success

    Question: What makes Apple revolutionary?

    Guy Kawasaki: if you were to ask people in 1983, you know, what would you like in a personal computer? They would have said, bigger, faster, cheaper, MS-DOS machine, bigger, faster, cheaper Apple II. No one would have described the Macintosh. And so the genius of Steve Jobs is not that he listens to the marketplace focus groups and marketing research and then he takes that research and he implements it, he does not believe in market research. Market research for Apple Computer is Steve’s left hemisphere is connected to his right hemisphere. That’s the focus group.

    And so the lesson of Apple is, you know, you cannot necessarily just listen to what able are saying they need because they are going to define everything they need in terms they already know, bigger, faster, cheaper. The shrill revolutionary, then surely enchanting company creates a product or service before people can really define the need for that product or service. They anticipated where the market will go as opposed to simply reacting quickly to where the market is already going.

  • The Cult of Steve Jobs

    David Pogue, of the New York Times, Arik Hesseldahl, of BusinessWeek, and Leander Kahney, of Cultofmac.com, discuss the cult of Steve Jobs and whether he deserves the status (2010-Apr-02).

  • Did Steve Jobs steal everything from Xerox PARC?

    Rich Neighbor with Open Doors

    Screenshot of the movie „Pirates of Silicon Valley“

    It is claimed again and again that in the course of the Macintosh’s development, Apple just resorted to the ideas the research laboratory Xerox PARC had hatched before. Fact or Fiction?

    The myth says, Apple CEO Steve Jobs saw Xerox PARC product, such as the GUI, either on a tour or at a trade show. He then used the PARC GUI implementation without permission, to create the Apple Lisa and the original Mac OS / Macintosh GUI.

    The myth entwines about a late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of „Making the Macintosh“, writes:

    According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC. These wonders had been locked away at PARC by a staff that didn’t understand the revolutionary potential of what they had created. Jobs, in contrast, was immediately converted to the religion of the graphical user interface, and ordered them copied by Apple, starting down the track that would eventually yield the Lisa and „insanely great“ Macintosh. The Apple engineers– that band of brothers, that bunch of pirates– stole the fire of the gods, and gave it to the people.

    It’s a good story. Unfortunately, it’s also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong. There are problems with chronology and timing. The testimony of a number of key figures at Apple suggests that the visit was not the revelation early accounts made it out to be. But the story also carries deeper assumptions about Apple, Xerox PARC, computer science in the late 1970s, and even the nature of invention and innovation that deserve to be examined and challenged.

    Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

    Let us take a closer look at what happend at Xerox PARC:

    Entrance of Xerox PARC in the eighties
    Entrance of Xerox PARC in the eighties

    In the Untied States, the brand name “Xerox” denotes photocopying just as “Kleenex” stands for tissues or “Scotch tape” for adhesive film. After all, already in 1950, the Xerox Corp. was the world’s first company to actually transfer the “Xerography” invented by the American law student Chester Carlson into a functional product. Carlson received in 1937 a patent for a process that he called „electrophotography.“ On 22 October 1938 followed the premiere in practice: With the help of a metal plate was coated with sulfur and a lamp Chester the lettering „10-22-38 Astoria“ on a wax paper.

    The first photocopy
    The first photocopy

    By the end of the sixties, the Xerox management sensed the threat of Japanese companies catching up on Xerox’s technological advantage. Moreover, the Xerox head worried that the “paperless office” might emerge with the following computer generations, in which the Xerox would no longer have a place. Against this background, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California was founded in 1970. John Warnock, former researcher in the Xerox PARC and later one of the two founders of Adobe Systems, remembers: “The atmosphere was electric – there was total intellectual freedom. There was no conventional wisdom; almost every idea was up for challenge and got challenged regularly.”

    The PARC Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) - 1970 ca.
    The PARC Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) – 1970 ca. – © PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Incorporated)

    Larry Tessler, who later took part in developing the Macintosh and the Newton PDA at Apple, also enjoyed the liberties the PARC provided in the seventies: “The management said go create the new world. We don’t understand it. Here are people who have a lot of ideas and tremendous talent, [are] young, energetic.” The problem, however, was that the company management at the East Coast of the USA did not [care a straw for] the PARC’s research results unless they were directly involved with photocopiers.

    In his TV documentation „Triumph of the Nerds“ Robert Cringley is interviewing researchers at the Xerox PARC

    Within two years, the researchers at the PARC had designed the Alto, which was something like the first personal computer. The Alto did not feature character-oriented graphics, as did all the other computers of that time, but a bit-oriented version instead. A high quality printer could print exactly what the screen displayed.

    A mouse. Removable data storage. Networking. A visual user interface. Easy-to-use graphics software. “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) printing, with printed documents matching what users saw on screen. E-mail. Alto for the first time combined these and other now-familiar elements in one small computer.

    Developed by Xerox as a research system, the Alto marked a radical leap in the evolution of how computers interact with people, leading the way to today’s computers.

    By making human-computer communications more intuitive and user friendly, Alto and similar systems opened computing to wide use by non-specialists, including children.

    People were able to focus on using the computer as a tool to accomplish a task rather than on learning their computer’s technical details.

    The Computer History Museum about the Xerox Alto
    Xerox Alto
    Xerox Alto

    However, this marvelous machine was not freely available on the market. Only small numbers were built initially, but by the late 1970s, about 1,000 were in use at various Xerox laboratories, and about another 500 in several universities. Total production was about 2,000 systems.

    The revolutionary Alto would have been an expensive personal computer if put on sale commercially. Lead engineer Charles Thacker noted that the first one cost Xerox $12,000. As a product, the price tag might have been $40,000.

    Commercial for the Xerox Alto (1972).

    This commercial for Xerox’s Alto computer released in 1972 introduced the world to the first desktop computer with a graphical user interface. Named after Xerox PARC’s home city of Palo Alto, California, the computer introduced the world to the window-oriented mouse and keyboard interface we use today. The Alto also had a distinctive portrait screen — an idea that was well before its time.

    The video showed how the computer could revolutionize your office life, with email, word processing and reminders all controlled by a cursor. It also shows the protagonist expressing his thoughts and actions out loud, as if in conversation with the Alto (which seems to be nicknamed „Fred“).

    Some Apple engineers were already familiar with PARC, its work, or technologies like the mouse. Bill Atkinson had read about Smalltalk as an undergraduate. Some had worked at PARC: Jef Raskin spent time there during a sabbatical year at Stanford, and had a number of friends who were researchers there. Finally, there were even some Apple employees whose had learned about the mouse while working for Douglas Engelbart at SRI in the 1960s and early 1970s, or Tymshare in the later 1970s.

    Read next page: How Apple discovered Xerox PARC

    Seiten: 1 2 3

  • The Wizards behind the Macintosh

    The making of Macintosh – An Interview with The Macintosh Design Team (Byte – Feb, 1984)

    Bill Atkinson
    Bill Atkinson

    Bill Atkinson nearly had his Ph.D. in neurochemistry before he admitted to himself that his real love was computers. He “got a quick E.E.” and started his own company. He was happily minding his own business when his friend ]eff Raskin asked him to come see what was happening at Apple, which was then six months old. Bill wasn’t really interested, but airplane tickets showed up in the mail, so he took a look. What he saw was “several years reaching into the future” of anything he could do where he was. He stayed to write Apple’s Pascal and later became Mr. User Interface for Lisa before he moved over to the Mac team.

     

     

    Andy Hertzfeld
    Andy Hertzfeld

    Andy Hertzfeld says, “The Apple II changed my life.” The computer people at Berkeley were a little narrow-minded about letting a grad student really get into the computer as Andy wanted to. So he spent nearly all the money he had in the world on an Apple II and had a computer he could control completely. He decided the Apple was more interesting than his classes and began writing programs for magazines. When Apple bought one of Andy’s programs, Steve Jobs offered him a job, which he took when he finished school. He worked on silent-type printers and Apple III demos until a shake-up in his part of the company shook him loose. He looked around and decided to go with Mac.

     

     

    Larry Kenyon
    Larry Kenyon

    Larry Kenyon arrived at Apple from Amdahl with a double degree in psychology and computer science. He was working on Apple III products when the same shake-up that shook Andy loose freed him, too. Andy asked Larry to join the Mac crew because he was one of the few people who understood the arcane art of making the Apple II work with printer peripherals, and anybody who can do that has to be good. No one in the company really believed that Mac was a product when Larry joined the Mac team. It was just a research effort, and there was some risk involved: would you still have your job in a few months?

     

     

    Joanna Hoffman
    Joanna Hoffman

    Joanna Hoffman is still on leave from her Ph.D. program in archaeology at the University of Chicago. She has a background in anthropology, physics, and linguistics. She came to Apple because of Mac. After using her computer skills in the field of archaeology for so long, she was tired of looking at the past and turned to the future. She was Mac’s entire marketing department for more than a year. She wants to make Mac a tool that feels natural for international users by making it speak their languages.

     

     

    Burrell Carver Smith
    Burrell Carver Smith

    Burrell Carver Smith encountered the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, got hooked on microprocessors, and moved to the Bay Area. Just riding around in a borrowed truck one day, he saw Apple and decided to drop in. The only job Apple had available was in the service department, repairing Apple IIs. He took the job and fixed at least a thousand Apple II boards and got involved in other projects before Jeff Raskin and Bill Atkinson recruited him for Mac. He talked the Lisa engineers out of some chips and stuff and got a prototype running over Christmas 1979. He was the first full-time Mac person after Jeff Raskin.

     

     

    Chris Espinosa
    Chris Espinosa

    Chris Espinosa says, There was no life before Apple.” At 13 years old he could be found cruising up and down the bus line in his home town, spending a few hours at each Byte Shop on the line until the owner threw him out. He discovered the way to keep from getting thrown out was to write demo programs for the machines, so he wrote for whatever was lying around: ”Altairs, IMSAIs, or this weird new machine called Apple I. His mom worried when he was offered a ride to the Homebrew Computer Club meeting with two scruffy characters named Jobs and Wozniak, but she gave in, and the rest is history. Chris spent a Christmas vacation debugging Apple’s BASIC in exchange for a whole row of 4K-byte RAM chips, which he thought was a pretty good deal. He worked part-time during college writing BASIC programs and reference manuals and signed on full-time when he graduated. He likes being in on the design process: ”If the machine is designed right in the first place, you don’t have to write a lot about it.”

     

     

    Jerry Manock
    Jerry Manock

    Jerrold C. Manock was a freelance product-design consultant with a Stanford education who finally joined Apple when he saw that three-quarters of his billing was to Apple anyway. He worked on the Apple II, the Disk II, the III, and Lisa before designing Mac. In Macintosh, he says, “The outside matches the inside in elegant simplicity.”

     

     

     

     

    Bruce Horn grew up at Xerox PARC, much the same way Chris grew up at Apple, and later attended Stanford. Bruce started working at Xerox when he was 14 years old: he was one of the kids Xerox brought in to test Smalltalk. Turns out he was brighter than most and became a systems wizard who actually implemented Smalltalk on a variety of different processors. Bruce is all of 23 years old now, but he spent seven years at Xerox PARC and brought Apple that perspective.

     

    George Crowe and David Egner designed the analog board in the Macintosh.

     

    Steve Capps assisted Andy Hertzfeld with the systems software.

  • Steve Wozniak: How I Invented the Personal Computer

    Steve Wozniak remembers building the first Apple Computer at Authors Business Series Luncheon talking about his book „iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way“: