Apple 1984 and the Rise of a Giant

It’s hard to imagine a time when Apple was just a fruit. Still, there was a time when Apple didn’t run the world, a time when they weren’t the biggest corporation, a time when they were, in fact, the plucky underdog in a new, exciting and growing computer industry.

For Apple, like most prominent tech companies, there was a time when they needed to break out and announce themselves to the world. The reason they needed to breakout as opposed to other big companies such as, say, the Ford motor company is because general people don’t understand “tech”. When Ford launched the Model T, it was clear what purpose it served; it moved you from A to B quicker than a horse. In the dawn of personal computers, most people did not understand computers and weren’t interested in knowing more. It is onto this stage that Apple found itself.

The “genius” of Steve Jobs has been fawned over time and time again, so I will try my best not to add to the endless devoted blogs on Jobs. However, I will allow myself to present two moments of genius, for lack of a better word. Firstly, and remember this as it will come up later, Jobs famously said in what has become the slogan of all PR, advertising, and marketing gurus everywhere “it’s not the customer’s job to know what they want, it’s our job to show them what they want”. Secondly, Jobs knew the personal computer would be a game-changer and to announce a game-changer, you need something different, something people hadn’t seen before.

So, let’s set the scene, the year was 1984, and computers are beginning to creep into the collective conscious as a new technology making its way from the office and into people’s homes. At the time, one giant ran this industry, yeah, that’s ol’ big blue — IBM. Many people knew IBM as they provided many various computer products in many different professional industries. Of course, many of you may be familiar with the old saying no one gets fired for buying IBM, which I think just about says it all. However, a lesser-known but up and coming company called Apple was setting up to challenge IBM with its breakthrough product, the Macintosh. Back in 1984, Steve Jobs was convinced the Macintosh, a personal computer everybody could use, would break through to the public and revolutionise the use of computers at home.

Now add to the mix two essential people; the surfing hippy Lee Clow, a friend of Steve Jobs and Creative Director at Chiat/Day, and the king of Sci-fi, Ridley Scott, a year removed from directing Blade Runner, and you have quite the team to create something unique. Take a look:

Clow shared the same vision as Jobs: the advert should break the mould and stop America in its tracks. To get everyone talking about the Macintosh, Clow targeted the Super Bowl as the perfect stage to showcase a once in a generation advert. Clow understood that during the Super Bowl, you had a captive audience of millions just waiting to be shown what they want. A simple idea that has mutated the Super Bowl from being a game of football to a global media event. For Clow, the dystopian future portrayed in the advert represented a future where the few controlled technology, clearly, a future Apple wanted to avoid. The Macintosh was here to smash down people’s perceptions of technology and give the people the power of technology harboured by a few technical elites. One can assume then, that the use of blue filters and tones within the advert just happened to resemble Apples old foe Big Blue by a happy coincidence.

Scott believed in the advert’s core message so much that he was prepared to do whatever it took to deliver a ground-breaking piece of work. Scott went as far as employing local skinheads to fill in as the droning masses to help alleviate an already growing budget that culminated with the most expensive advert ever made at the time.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, though, as even Apple wasn’t free of the reassuring safety of a conservative board of directors, directors who were horrified by the advert. It’s hard to entirely blame these directors as their views were echoed by the adverts poor results from test audience focus groups who also detested the advert. The directors couldn’t understand how an advert that didn’t even show the product could be effective. In the 80s, the traditional view was that people didn’t know what personal computers could do for them. Apple surely needed to explain how these computers would work so people could see if they needed them and thus go out and buy one. For the board, the advert should demonstrate something useful like how the computer can help you do your taxes, logical yes, but not a great plan.

Herein lies the genius of Jobs — people need to be shown what they want — to do this, you need to grab their attention, and attention-grabbing is what this advert does best. Just imagine watching the Super Bowl back in 1984 and then being hit with this advert. People had never seen anything like it, an advert that easily can be seen as art; it makes you want to know more, it instils so much emotion within you that you cannot ignore it.

Luckily, the directors blinked first and allowed Jobs to air the advert at the Super Bowl, on one condition that the advert was not to be aired again and was not to be used as part of a broader advertising campaign. In a stroke of good fortune that always seems to befall great companies, the directors’ decision only served to add to the mystery and allure of the advert and ultimately helped preserve its legacy. The rest, as they say, is history.