Over its fifty-year history, Apple has had its share of ups and downs. The near-ubiquitous tech giant was not always so, and has at several points in its life come perilously close to oblivion. And while revolutionary products like the best iPhones and MacBooks have been the engine that has driven Apple’s flight to the top, a big part of the firm’s success has also been its knack for a good ad.
I’d go so far as to say that some of the best adverts of all time are Apple ads. Over the years, the firm has shown a knack for stunning simplicity in its advertising, paring its concepts down to just the essentials in order to convey a hugely effective message. Not every Apple ad has been a success – we won’t be speaking of the infamous iPad Pro ‘Crush’ ad – but several of them have been indisputable all-timers.
Article continues below1. ‘1984’ (1983)
All right, no messing about, let’s start with a bang. You’re Apple. You’ve got a new computer coming out. You need to tell people about it. So, what do you do? Put together a snappy, informative commercial listing the new computer’s features, innovations and advantages over its competition?
NO. You hire legendary film director Ridley Scott, fresh off Blade Runner, and you get him to craft you a one-minute dystopian nightmare that culminates with an Olympic athlete smashing Big Brother with a sledgehammer, and you air it during the third quarter of the Super Bowl. Obviously.
The computer in question was the original Apple Macintosh, a machine designed to challenge IBM’s dominance of the personal computing industry. And given the year that the computer was arriving, the parallels with George Orwell’s novel depicting an oppressive, conformist future were just too tempting to pass up. So, in his keynote address before introducing the ad, Steve Jobs cast Apple as the ‘only hope’ against IBM dominating ‘the entire information age’. Quite funny, in retrospect.
Sure, it could be argued that casting a competing computer company as a despotic totalitarian regime could be considered ‘a little much’. But it’s undeniable that the ad itself is incredibly effective. Ridley brings that consummate directorial expertise, dissolving seamlessly from gorgeous matte paintings to grimily detailed sets. Venerable British thesp David Graham brings an air of gravitas as Big Brother, and Olympian Anya Major hurls that hammer like a champ.
The ad has since been described as more successful than the computer it was shilling, which is entirely fair. Greater successes for Apple were to follow.
2. ‘Think Different’ (1997)
In the 1990s, Apple was still defining itself in opposition to IBM. It was this dialectic that led the tech giant to its most famous slogan – ‘Think Different’ – which modern audiences may not be aware was intended in part as a riposte to IBM’s famous ‘Think’ slogan.
As our Apple logo history notes, Apple had floundered somewhat in the 1990s. Its computers were thought of by big business as toys, not suitable for ‘real’ computing the ways PCs were. However, they were proving popular among creatives in the entertainment industry, so Apple leaned into ideas of counterculture, creativity, and seeing the world a little differently.
The resulting ad, ‘Think Different’, was initially scripted by advertising creative Rob Siltanen, with the help of alumni from the 1984 campaign like art director Lee Clow. It was another art director, Craig Tanimoto, who pushed for the grammatically bumpy ‘Think Different’ rather than ‘Think Differently’, conveying the idea of different as a noun rather than an adverb.
While images display a range of renowned luminaries from Einstein to Gandhi, Picasso to John Lennon, a softly spoken narration by actor and Apple enthusiast Richard Dreyfuss says: "Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently."
Steve Jobs reportedly hated the first cut of the ad, throwing one of his infamous tantrums to the point where Rob Siltanen refused to deal with him again. After a few rounds of tweaks, however, Jobs was assuaged, and the resulting campaign became one of Apple’s most iconic.
3. ‘Switch!’ (2002)
‘Switching’ was the number-one priority for Apple in the early 2000s – get as many people as possible to switch from a PC to a Mac. To this end came the ‘Switch!’ ads, a series that purported to show ordinary people detailing the endless travails they were experiencing from using a PC. At the end, a simple on-screen would direct them – and by extension, you – to apple.com/switch, a URL still in use today, albeit for iPhones.
The simple motif of a speaker on a plain white background would go on to be used in the more famous ‘Get a Mac’ ads that followed a few years later. However, the ‘Switch!’ ads became pretty popular in their own right, with the one embedded above making a minor internet celebrity out of high-school student Ellen Feiss.
Some viewers were convinced Ellen was stoned throughout the recording (a high school student, if you will). Watch and decide for yourself, but I’m sceptical.
4. The iPod silhouette (2003-2008)
Hell yeah. Now we’re cooking with propane. If you were alive and awake in the 2000s, you will recognise the instantly iconic iPod silhouette commercials, which made Apple’s portable music player into a graphic sensation. The simple juxtaposition of an all-black dancing silhouette with the tell-tale white headphone cord leading from the earbuds to the instantly recognisable rectangle of the iPod. Perfect. Slick, simple, effective. Even if you’ve never heard of an iPod, you understand what’s on offer immediately.
The iPod ads were always at their best when they were kept as straightforward and streamlined as possible – I did not need to see Bono’s face on my iconic iPod silhouette. No, thank you.
5. ‘Get a Mac’ (2006-2009)
The heirs apparent to the ‘Switch!’ ads, sharing a significant amount of visual DNA, the ‘Get a Mac’ ads were by all accounts much more successful, and are likely more familiar to most of you reading this. If you’re of a certain age, the couplet ‘I’m a Mac… and I’m a PC’ will likely stir instant recognition, though depending on where you’re based, you might hear it in the tones of Justin Long and John Hodgman, or Robert Webb and David Mitchell.
The ads present a straightforward dichotomy. Mac and PC. One is laid-back and smooth; the other is uptight and awkward. One is easy to use and ‘just works’; the other is bloated with viruses and prone to crashing.
However, what was critical to the ads’ success, in my view, was the tone. The scripts fostered a sense of affable mutual respect between the two. In one of the US ads, Mac speaks glowingly of PC’s ability with numbers – ‘You should see what this guy can do with a spreadsheet – it’s insane.’
We see echoes of ‘Think Different’, with Apple positioning its machines as the more likeable alternative to all-business PCs. Once again, quite a different positioning to nowadays.
6. ‘Hello?’ (2007)
Beautiful simplicity – you can’t beat it. Context matters for Apple’s famous ‘Hello’ ad – it was first shown during the 2007 Oscars. Heralding the coming of an interesting new concept called an ‘iPhone’ (jury’s still out as to whether it’ll catch on), the ad weaved together a breathless montage of cinema’s greatest stars, from Marilyn Monroe and Steve McQueen to Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz, all picking up the phone and saying… well, you can guess.
7. ‘Taylor vs Treadmill’ (2016)
If you’re going to get someone in to promote a music streaming service, you might as well bring out the big guns. In 2016, Apple launched an all-out promotional blitz for Apple Music by recruiting Taylor Swift – and once again there’s a bit of interesting context here, as the singer had previously blasted the service in an open letter over its policy of not paying artists during users’ three-month trials, and had even gone so far as to remove her music from the service. As you might imagine, this engendered a swift course correction from Apple.
So, the Taylor vs Treadmill ad was also a means to demonstrate that the popstar and the tech giant had kissed and made up. In a simple 30-second spot, Taylor is setting up for a session on the treadmill. She chooses a running track – Drake’s Jumpman, sales of which reportedly jumped (ahem) by 431% following the ad. As she starts running, she mouths along to the track, ultimately getting so into it that the treadmill escapes from under her and sends her base over apex. As she recovers, the slogan appears: ‘Distractingly Good’. Sublime.
8. Don’t Blink (2016)
If there’s a lesson to be learned from looking back over these ads, it seems to be that Apple’s greatest successes have been through simplicity. With the admittedly enormous exception of ‘1984’, the ads on this list have been pared back as much as possible, honed down and distilled to their core message, the way all good ads should be.
‘Don’t Blink’ from 2016 is my favourite of the bunch because it’s at once beautifully simple and thrillingly complex. The conceit is that over the next 107 seconds, Apple is going to tell you all about its new iPhone 7, AirPods and Apple Watch, in text that goes by so fast that if you blink, you’ll miss it.
And it really does. Text flies by, switching up between white on black and black on white, interspersed with sizzle shots of the products and glimpses of Tim Cook arriving at the auditorium to present. A frenetic, percussive beat keeps the pace high, while visual aids instantly convey core concepts like the new low-light camera on the iPhone, or the Watch’s waterproofing.
It’s just brilliant. The graphic design, the animation, the video editing. To borrow an Appleism, it just works. It’s an ad so good that advertising execs to this day still go to bed angry that they didn’t come up with it themselves.
While it's not clear what kind of new tech we'll see from Apple in the years to come, one thing we can be sure if is that the ads it uses to promote it will be full of creativity and flair – even if they don't always hit the mark.
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