Think different
[6] In 1997, under CEO Gil Amelio, BBDO pitched a new brand campaign with the slogan "We're back" to an internal marketing meeting at the then struggling Apple.
Reportedly everyone in the meeting expressed approval with the exception of the recently returned Steve Jobs who said "the slogan was stupid because Apple wasn't back [yet].
The look and feel of the print, outdoor and the photography used was researched, curated, and visually developed by art & design director Jessica (Schulman) Edelstein who, together with Lee Clow, met weekly with Steve Jobs and the team at Apple to hone the campaign in its many forms.
But he was far from the mastermind behind the renowned launch spot...While Steve Jobs didn't create the advertising concepts, he does deserve an incredible amount of credit.
Without Steve Jobs there's not a shot in hell that a campaign as monstrously big as this one would get even close to flying off the ground...it got an audience that once thought of Apple as semi-cool, but semi-stupid to suddenly think about the brand in a whole new way.
He personally called the families of Jim Henson and John F. Kennedy and flew to New York City to visit Yoko Ono.
[11][9][12] Lee Clow argued that it would be "really powerful" for Jobs to narrate the piece, as a symbol of his return to the company and of reclaiming the Apple brand.
It's to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
The one-minute ad featured black-and-white footage of 17 iconic 20th-century personalities, in this order of appearance: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon (with Yoko Ono), Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog), Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso.
In order of appearance: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Martha Graham, Muhammad Ali, Alfred Hitchcock, Mahatma Gandhi, Jim Henson, Maria Callas, Pablo Picasso, and Jerry Seinfeld.
Another early example of the "Think different" ads is on February 4, 1998, months before switching the colored apple logo to solid white, where an ad aired with a snail carrying an Intel Pentium II chip on its back moving slowly, as the Power Macintosh G3 claims that it is twice as fast as Intel's Pentium II Processor.
Those featured a portrait of one historic figure, with a small Apple logo and the words "Think different" in one corner, with no reference to the company's products.
Creative geniuses whose thinking and work actively changed their respective fields where honored and included: Jimi Hendrix, Richard Clayderman, Miles Davis, Martha Graham, Cesar Chavez, John Lennon, Laurence Gartel, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt and others.
Educator Set During a special event held on October 14, 1998, at the Flint Center in Cupertino California, a limited edition 11" x 14" softbound book was given to employees and affiliates of Apple Computer, Inc. to commemorate the first year of the ad campaign.
The 50 page book contained a foreword by Steve Jobs, the text of the original "Think different" ad, and illustrations of many of the posters used in the campaign along with narratives describing each person.
In the years leading up to the ad Apple had lost market share to the Wintel ecosystem which offered lower prices, more software choices, and higher-performance CPUs.
In addition to being seen on screen, the campaign is referenced by the story multiple times: The film's fictionalized version of Steve Wozniak compares himself to John Lennon before being visually juxtaposed with Lennon's frame in "Crazy Ones"; a mock-up poster including Alan Turing in the campaign is rejected when Jobs realizes that Turing is not recognizable (allowing another character to comment on the myth that Turing inspired the Apple Logo); and Jobs' daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs mocks the phrasing of "Think Different" as opposed to the grammatically-correct "Think Differently".
The Richard Dreyfuss audio version is used in the introduction of the first episode of The Crazy Ones,[22] a podcast provided by Ricochet,[23] hosted by Owen Brennan and Patrick Jones.
[30] In the movie Monsters, Inc., an easter egg magazine at the end of the film references the slogan with a computer captioned, "Scare Different.
