Apple's Iconic "1984" Ad, 25 Years Later

(CNET)  This story was written by CNET's Caroline McCarthy.

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The fact that the Los Angeles Raiders humiliated the Washington Redskins in a 38-to-9 victory is a mere afterthought. Super Bowl XVII's lasting legacy has been a single advertisement sandwiched somewhere in the third quarter: Apple Computer's iconic "1984" commercial.

It began, in a clear nod to George Orwell's novel of the same name, with tense strains of music, the image of figures marching through a tube across a dank industrial complex, and the start of a bizarre monologue: "Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives."

Directed by Ridley Scott just a year after "Blade Runner," "1984" debuted on January 22, 1984, and its narrative is now geek canon. Scores of blank-faced people are fixated on a broadcast of a Big Brother figure on a giant television screen, until a woman in bright athletic apparel sprints down a center aisle, wielding a hammer. She hurls it at the screen, which explodes into a bright white light. The expressions on the faces in the crowd morph into fascination.

The science fiction-like display of iconoclasm versus conformity is then explained in a message that appears onscreen: "On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'"

(YouTube.com)

In the entertainment industry, it was the dawn of the cinematic Super Bowl ad. For historians, it was a notable moment in Soviet-tinged pop culture. But in the tech world, this was the birth of Apple as we know it - 25 years ago this week.

"That was certainly Apple's big debut," said Douglas Raybeck, a professor emeritus in Hamilton College's anthropology department who has written about the Cold War's role in pop culture and admits to being a decades-long Apple fan. "They were around before that. People knew of them. They had had some very clever little ads, but they must have bet the house on that one."

Indeed, they did; and in fact, it's become common knowledge that Apple's board of directors came close to canceling the TV spot altogether. Produced by agency Chiat/Day (which, in its current incarnation as part of TBWA, still creates Apple's ads) with a budget of $900,000, it was also one of the most expensive advertisements in television's history.

At the time, Apple was a long shot in the nascent PC market share wars and was far eclipsed by IBM in its "Big Blue" heyday: the company was taking a staggering gamble with a highbrow, allegory-infused ad that didn't even display the product onscreen.

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"(Apple was) very oblique in the presentation of (its) product," Raybeck commented. "There was no computer shown. None of the marvelous graphics the Mac was capable of were in evidence, and what (was) displayed was very dark. The lighting was dark. The images were dark. And, of course, that was part of what they wanted to get across - that this dark, conforming, restricting environment can be broken through."

"It was a major statement at the time, and it's rare that you make a major statement like that and actually deliver on it in a way that we're still talking about 25 years later," said Ian Schafer, CEO of interactive-ad firm Deep Focus, who says he recalls seeing the original airing of the ad as a 9-year-old. "You make a bold statement about a revolution that you are going to start, and it's one that has resulted in the market share that they now have."

Apple didn't keep pushing the "1984" message. Although it went on to win an impressive handful of advertising awards, the commercial was never broadcast again. Nor did it usher in a true explosion of all things Mac. In 1985, founder Steve Jobs left the company after a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, kicking off a decade-long absence.

But "1984" was not forgotten: Its production served as the opening scene of "The Pirates of Silicon Valley," the 1999 TV movie about Jobs' early years at Apple and his rivalry with Microsoft founder Bill Gates. And in 2008, the 24-year-old commercial was spoofed in a Web-based attack ad against Sen. Hillary Clinton, then vying for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"It's been 25 years, and I still remember the images," Raybeck said. "So it was, in that sense, very compelling, and I remember them not because I thought at the time, 'Oh, what a brilliant ad.' I later came to believe, 'Oh, what a brilliant ad,' because it sticks with you."

Not to mention the fact that Apple's underlying marketing message has remained arrow-straight over the past two and a half decades.

(Apple Computer Inc.)

"In a few years, we may be talking about the 25th anniversary of the Think Different campaign," Ian Schafer said of the Apple ad slogan that first debuted in 1997, shortly after Jobs' return to the company, which placed Apple's logo in photographs of the likes of Alfred Hitchcock (left) and John Lennon.

"That was another way of Apple talking about change, about intellect. You could make an argument that using Gandhi or John Lennon in an advertisement is almost blasphemous because these guys were bigger than whatever advertising claim you were about to make. These guys meant more to the world than your brand could ever be. But again, they were able to pull it off."

The legacy of "1984" remains present, too, in the current string of Mac ads, the witty "Get a Mac" series, which pit actor Justin Long as a cool-guy "Mac" in jeans and a hoodie against the incarnation of a "PC."

Played by comedian John Hodgman in hideously outdated business-formal attire, the doltishly unflappable thought process of the "PC" evokes a more twee strain of the conformity highlighted in "1984." It's Apple's same message, adapted for an age in which political commentary takes the form of "The Colbert Report" rather than "Brazil."

"It's probably the most explicit statement of, basically, a cultural revolution," Douglas Raybeck said. "This is what they're saying - that this is new and really different and revolutionary."

But as "1984" turns 25, its images of conformity and totalitarianism have grown increasingly sprinkled with irony. It's the irony of the launches of both the iPhone and its iPhone 3G successor, reflected in the faces of the Apple "fanboys" willing to wait in line on the sidewalk for the better part of a week in the midst of a stifling New York summer and then - wait for it - descend into the underground Fifth Avenue store in formation as uniformed Apple retail employees guided them through a gauntlet. As critics of the "Apple cult" have pointed out, they seem to be willing to believe their fearless leader's every word.

The irony of "1984" is there, too, in the conflicting reports over Steve Jobs' health that put the spotlight on Apple's tight-lipped corporate culture and shadowy PR-speak, making Cupertino seem much less like the lone runner and more like the image of Big Brother onscreen. And it was there when journalist Dan Lyons anonymously satirized Apple in his "Fake Steve Jobs" blog, as though the CEO were a corrupt monarch worthy of a Jonathan Swift-like tongue-lashing.

Over the years, Apple's market share has indeed grown, and it has come to be a force in the music and entertainment industries with iTunes and the iPod, not to mention the telecommunications business with the iPhone. Like a populist revolution that becomes a little too successful, its trademark gutsiness and cult following start to look less like a scrappy innovator and more like, well, a sprawling conglomerate bent on global domination.

But even that might not matter. Marketing, even marketing of "1984"-caliber brilliance, has to be bolstered by a worthy product, Ian Schafer said.

"I think that people are willing to look past that," he said of the occasional Apple-Big Brother parallels. "At the end of the day, keep making a great product, keep delivering on your promise, and I will continue to be a loyal consumer. That's the value exchange that happens between a brand and a consumer. … (They've) built up enough equity in the consumer's emotional bank account, which Apple can afford to make withdrawals from every so often."

For more info:

Watch Apple's "1984" commercial

YouTube: Interview with Ridley Scott about the making of "1984"

"Get a Mac" ads
By Caroline McCarthy

[arcane12]

The poverty of reality thru the endless consumption of technology for its own sake!

[caldwellptr]

"(They''ve) built up enough equity in the consumer''s emotional bank account, which Apple can afford to make withdrawals from every so often ..."

I wish I had a bigger emotinal bank account balance ...

[whitemale08]

The whole ''information-age'' is been a bust.

We used Apple and Microsoft as an excuse to become a post-industrial service-sector credit-swaps derivatives market in this country.

Now look at us.

Sure, we can look at porn and watch youtube on the internet but credit has went up in a puff of smoke as over a quadrillion in garbage credit-derivates evaporate into thin air.

We needed to go back to work in 1984.

We didn''t need Ronald Reagan to bust up unions and use trickle-down supply-side Reagonomics to make way for Wal Marts and strip malls to keep people stuck in low wage jobs flipping hamburgers working the register.

Apple can do us a favor and push for an economy that will put us back to work in hard physical work to rebuild this country that earns real wages and benifits.

No more of this phony economy with bullsh*t wages, 401k scam accounts and benifits that requires co-pays equal to the price of treatment.

[jimofoz]

As long as you run your Apple MacOS on a Apple Mac computer supplied by Apple, your freedom is secure. Those stuffy corporate drones will be forever doomed to run Microsoft Windows on, er, well just about anything made by anybody.

[tmittelstaed]

Until Apple scrapped that monstrosity MacOS and reformulated it''s operating system on FreeBSD Unix and NeXT Unix, to create the modern MacOS X Unix operating system, the Mac was an utter joke in the computing world.
Today, as a Unix workstation, the Mac has access to many thousands of free Open Source software programs that have been ported to it, and it is an extremely valuable aid to scientific computing now.
Most Mac users are, naturally, utterly ignorant of the power and incredible ability of their daily use computer, and use it for dull mundane tasks like surfing the web and reading e-mail. But, that doesn''t matter since their pocketbooks are funding the continuation of the platform and the usability is there for the taking to the people who know.

[akakjb]

Yeah, the Mac was great if you wanted to do publishing. If you wanted really special things like, ya know, *color*, you went PC or Amiga, the latter if you wanted to do video productions that previously had to be done on $30,000 machines. But Apple turned that technology because nobody would ever want to work with video on their computers. This from the same company that insisted Mac versions of software available for $20 on the other two platforms had to sell for over $100 because ''Macintosh users have come to expect a level of quality best shown by price point'' (direct quote from the letter Apple sent the developer).

Macs are good for a lot but I want to smack that smug little twit in the ads every time I see them. I think most people went to see the last Die Hard film just to see Justin Long get the *** beat out of him. And the iPhone is an overrated piece of tech - I''m extremely happy with my HTC Mogul and the tons of freeware I''ve got loaded on it that gives it a lot more functions than Apple''s phone. Not to mention I like having an actual keyboard. So when a segment of the world screeches to halt and rends their clothing when Jobs finally dies, the rest of us will be ready to carry on.

[joepack61]

The MacIntoch sold for over $2,000 at the time. A good word processing typewritier with memory was around $350. What a con game by Apple. The Mac didn''t even have a printer included, and all anyone ever did on the thing was WORD PROCESSING.

[mnelsonix]

...install a hive mindset in their followers.
Posted by CountSlapula at 02:06 PM
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Well said.

Comsumers of Apple products seem to have a bit of a superiority complex about them....donchya think?

My 21 yr old daughter looks contemptuously at me when I don''t answer a text or phone call. 24-7 she''s connected, and will respond like a willing automaton to any activity on her iPhone, any hour of any day. Taboo to turn it off. She denies texting while driving but I know better, I just paid her deductable after she rear-ended someone.

It''s a connected world and I remember that 1984 commercial(I was a Raider fan). It seems that Apple has helped create the very thing they implied they were fighting against. A world of connected automatons.

I work in electronics but I''m older. I feel no need to be continually connected. The younger generations do. They embrace it. Try taking your adult kids on a vacation away from connections...they won''t go...mine won''t anyway.

Oh...gotta go...text comin'' in. cya L8r.

[countslapula]

Kind of odd that a brand intent on vanquishing old guard corporations, turned out to just want to make computers and electronics more cult-like, and install a hive mindset in their followers.

[rational_1]

Twenty years and seven Macs later, much of my life and work still revolves around this electronic friend.
Posted by studio41 at 12:19 PM : Jan 23, 2009

If your life revolves around it, your Mac is more fiend than friend.