Behind "Think Different"

The People Behind Apple's "Think Different" Campaign

By Stuart Elliott
August 3, 1998 - New York Times

For almost a year, Apple Computer Inc. has been displaying images of some of the world's most-admired achievers in fields from government and business to human rights and the arts as the centerpiece of a campaign that ungrammatically urges consumers to "Think different."

The goal of the campaign is to further polish the once-tarnished Apple brand name, asserting that the company nurtures creativity by behaving as unconventionally as the accomplished thinkers and doers who are praised as "the round pegs in the square holes" in television commercials, print ads, billboards, posters and wall signs.

"The ads are for people who don't care what the computer does," said Allen Olivo, senior director for worldwide marketing communications at Apple in Cupertino, Calif., "but care about what they can do with the computer.

"The premise is that people who use Apple computers are different," he said, "and that we make computers for those creative people who believe that one person can change the world."

The celebrated strivers who make it through a nomination and selection process at Apple and its advertising agency, the TBWA Chiat/Day unit of TBWA Worldwide in Venice, Calif., are portrayed in the ads as larger-than-life icons in striking black-and-white photographs. They are presented as the kind of heroes who, a commercial proclaims, "push the human race forward," a phrase that subtly flatters the intended audience for recognizing the subjects.

The campaign has so far featured more than 40 so-called crazy ones: historic and contemporary figures who include Bob Dylan, Einstein, Ted Turner, Picasso, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Edison, Muhammad Ali, Alfred Hitchcock, Miles Davis, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Amelia Earhart, Jim Henson, Rosa Parks, Frank Lloyd Wright and Jerry Seinfeld. And more are on the way.

"We're not trying to say these people use Apple," said Lee Clow, the chief creative officer at TBWA Worldwide, owned by Omnicom Group, "or that if they could've used a computer, they would've used Apple. Instead, we're going for the emotional celebration of creativity, which should always be part of how we speak about the brand."

Asked if it was overreaching to involve Einstein, Gandhi and Picasso in pitching, Olivo replied: "We would never associate these people with any product; it's Apple celebrating them versus Apple using them. To say that Albert Einstein would have used a computer would cross the line. Why would he need one? But it's different to say he looked at the world differently."

That makes the Apple advertising a kind of commercialized, updated version of songs like "They All Laughed" and "You're the Top," which paid tribute to such men and women of distinction as Marconi, Garbo, Ford, O'Neill, Astaire and the Wright brothers. At least two figures mentioned in those songs -- Edison and Gandhi -- have turned up in the Apple campaign.

And of course there is a lengthy list of campaigns that feature constellations of stars rather than single celebrities, from the "Dewar's Profiles" for Dewar's Scotch whisky to the khaki-clad notables for Gap Inc. to the "milk mustache" ads created for the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board.

Critics often complain that celebrities appearing in ads are "selling out." Olivo said Apple and TBWA Chiat/Day "haven't really heard that," even about performers in the campaign like Dylan and Joan Baez, "perhaps because we don't use their work as much as show them working."

The ads have already won several industry awards; the first television commercial in the campaign has been nominated for an Emmy. The ads have also inspired parodies. The ABC and CBS television networks ran promotional spots spoofing the campaign, while pranksters have posted "Think different" lampoons with Charles Manson and Genghis Khan on Web sites.

And there are games based on the campaign. One is to guess who may next be featured in an ad; how about Steven Spielberg? Ray Charles? Bill Gates? Another is to play "Whozzat?" with friends and co-workers, asking them to identify some of the less familiar faces like the dancer Martha Graham, the singer Maria Callas, the photographer Ansel Adams, the architect Frank Gehry, and the advertising executives Bill Bernbach and Mary Wells Lawrence.

The genesis of the campaign was the crisis facing Apple last year when Steven Jobs returned to run the company, which was confronting huge problems that included plunging market share, declining stock value and sagging employee morale. It was a year ago Monday that Jobs decided to seek help by reuniting with Clow. Jobs and Clow -- whose birthday is coincidentally Aug. 3 -- collaborated on Apple ads like the famous "1984" commercial when Jobs originally ran Apple and Clow was the top creative executive at the old Chiat/Day agency.

"They asked us to come in and talk about what Apple needed to do to get its focus back," Clow said. "It really wasn't hard; it was just to go back to Apple's roots.

"Our thought was that Apple was not the computer on every desk," he said, "but the computer loved by most creative communities like graphic designers, Web sites designers, film makers, advertising agencies, because it doesn't get in the way of the creativity. The analogy we made was to Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which have been successful by being a unique product for a unique audience."

At first, the agency wanted to show "people currently using Apple technology to articulate the 'Think different' concept," Clow said, such as animators at Dreamworks SKG, "but that didn't seem quite a big enough statement."

Then one weekend, he added, "we walked into a room and saw 'Think different' attached to Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Einstein," paying tribute "to creativity and genius by saluting the kind of people who think and change things." Among those involved in that "Eureka!" moment were Rob Siltanen, creative director; Jessica Schulman, art director, and Craig Tanimoto, copywriter.

The campaign was swiftly approved by Apple, then begun with the television commercial, which first ran on Sept. 28, followed by the print ads, billboards and posters.

It was always the intention to run the photos without identifications, Clow said, citing a similar strategy pursued by Chiat/Day for Nike Inc. during the 1984 Summer Olympics with wall posters of athletes like Joan Benoit and Mary Decker.

"It becomes more involving and challenging to figure something out," he explained, "like solving a puzzle. Young people like it because they feel they're not being talked down to. And the knowledgeable people feel it's cool to be among the cognoscenti."

Even so, Olivo said, "I can't tell you how many advertising people called when the Wells ads ran to say, 'I know I'm supposed to know, but who's the woman?' "

Since then, TBWA Chiat/Day executives have sifted through hundreds of suggestions, via letters and e-mail, for potential enlistees for the campaign.

Jobs has been involved from the beginning, Clow said, contributing "people who thrill him like Buckminster Fuller" and helping secure photographs from sources like Ms. Ono.

The one setback so far for the campaign has been a spate of negative publicity generated by a decision not to run ads with the Dalai Lama in Hong Kong to placate the Chinese Communists who opposed him. (The ads continued in other countries.)

"Most companies probably wouldn't have gone near him in the first place," Clow said.

Determining who will appear in the campaign involves negotiations with representatives of people who are living, and sometimes the people themselves. With the dead, rights are obtained from "close family members, estates, lawyers," Clow said. "Some are harder, some are easier."

Sometimes, he added, it is a question of "getting the right image of some people who are not here to photograph anymore."

As for payment, Olivo said, "everyone has received compensation, but not one has accepted money for personal gain." He and Clow said they were all given money and/or computer equipment, which have been donated to schools, foundations, charities and nonprofit organizations. They declined to discuss the specific amounts.

Olivo credited the campaign with a major role in the recent improvement in Apple's fortunes. Though the company is still struggling, Apple has surprised the naysayers by exceeding earnings estimates from Wall Street for three consecutive quarters, selling record numbers of G3 Macintosh computers, raising its stock price and reducing employee turnover.

"It accomplished everything we wanted to in spades," Clow said proudly, "and so much more than we'd hoped."

There is a long wish list of personalities for future ads, said Clow, citing the Beatles, Orson Welles, Jackie Robinson, Cesar Chavez, John Glenn "before he goes back into space" and Charlie Chaplin, which would also tweak an Apple rival because an actor portraying Chaplin as the Little Tramp was once the focus of ads for IBM.

He said one of the biggest disappointments in the campaign was the failure to get the wife and son of Jacques Cousteau to agree to allow use of his photograph.

On Olivo's wish list are Elvis Presley, Dag Hammarskjold, Jimi Hendrix, "maybe Nelson Mandela" and perhaps Howard Cosell, who, Olivo said, "changed sportscasting -- but is that a heroic enterprise?"

Both want to include additional celebrities from Australia, Japan and other countries outside North America.

And on one issue, both think alike: They agree with a decision by Jobs not to be the subject of an ad.

Here's to the Crazy Ones

The Crafting of "Think Different"

By Lee Clow and the Team at TBWA/Chiat Day

Chiat/Day and their successful Think Different campaign seemed an appropriate story for our first issue of Apple Media Arts. The theme repeated over and over in our interviews with TBWA Chiat/Day creatives was their insistence that they could never have produced so much Macintosh advertising, so fast, without Macintosh technology.

Chiat's art directors used Mac systems for every aspect of the design process. In the case of Think Different, a campaign destined by its media schedule to include many one-of-a-kind outdoor locations, photographs were imported to ensure that the image on a billboard or bus shelter sign worked in its environment. And when the art director was satisfied, a JPEG image was posted on the Net to bring the client into the loop.

While the art directors drew on the graphic power of the Macintosh, the agency's video producers and editors were using inhouse, Mac-powered editing machines to view and edit archival footage as it arrived from all around the globe. Apple's QuickTime technology played an important part in this process. Images from graphics stations were imported into the everchanging rough cuts, an advantage that allows the agency's inhouse editorial department to go from rough edit to finished cut without ever leaving the Chiat/Day offices.

The following interview is from "The Making of Think Different," a video produced for Macworld Expo, January 1998. The participants include TBWA Chiat/Day Chairman and Chief Creative Officer Worldwide, Lee Clow; Art Director, Jessica Schulman; Executive Producer, Jennifer Golub; and Senior Editor, Dan Bootzin.

Lee Clow: When Steve called us, he said, in typical Steve Jobs fashion, "OK, we're late." So we got onto a fast track immediately. And I think it's kind of interesting, the Macintosh technology impacted every aspect of the development, from finding the archival film and assembling it to negotiating the rights to the footage. You can imagine the emails going back and forth with Steve being in the middle, so when we needed him to talk to Time magazine, or to the estate of Albert Einstein, or to Yoko Ono, he could get an answer right away. That's the whole communication dimension. See, the technology not only allows us to build the ads in five different sizes and finish the TV commercials, but allows us all to stay connected, as well.

Jessica Schulman: For us it was important to get this campaign out visually on the streets where people are and where they are not expecting to be touched by a tribute from a computer company. One great way that I used the Mac as a tool was to scan in pictures of the actual street environments where these images were going to appear. Walls from New York City, walls from Los Angeles, the bus on which the image of Rosa Parks was going to be painted. Using Photoshop, I was able to figure out how to best crop the images or place the logo to take advantage of the space.

Lee Clow: Anyone who is a commercial artist or communication artist has the same kind of passion for Apple and Macintosh. So it took, you know, nanoseconds to get over into this passionate area of searching for the idea of how we reposition Apple. And when we put people to work over a weekend and generated, with the Mac, more ideas than we could have generated in a week ten years ago, everybody immediately embraced the idea that this campaign should be about being creative and thinking out of the box. It got bigger when we said why not celebrate anyone who's ever thought about ways that they could change the world, and that's when Gandhi and Edison started coming into the conversation.

Jennifer Golub: We had this premise. We knew that it was going to be personalities and people who made an impact on the twentieth century. We had 17 days from the time of approval to the time when we needed to be on air. There were two things that made it possible. One was sheer will power, the other was technology.

Lee Clow: It's amazing how much of what our creative and production people do for Apple is generated with Mac technology. We can actually have an idea take shape in front of us, inside the computer: the images to the type to the retouching and then right to video, if necessary. As a result, we're doing our work better and faster. The technology doesn't replace the idea, but it allows us to play with ideas that maybe we wouldn't have even explored before. Because we can actually try them and look at them and see if they work or not.

Jessica Schulman: To be able to have communications software open, and be able to have Photoshop open, and be able to have Illustrator open, it allows me to get out what's in my head. I can take my most innovative thoughts, manipulate them, massage them, and change them, and grow them, and get them out for the world to see. And that's what the Think Different campaign is all about¨paying tribute to people who thought differently, and who thought creatively, and then empowering those of us today to go forward and do the same.

Jennifer Golub: With our schedule, it would have been impossible to have executed this campaign prior to having a nonlinear editing system. Producing the Think Different campaign was a very live situation, where new material was arriving each day. I was constantly changing the material and also changing the cut based on the copy and the text. What had to be infused was an emotional resonance to the spot. My researcher actually found Maria Callas' home movies. They came in from Greece in a big can covered with dust. When we found that one moment when she blew a kiss and then put in the footage of Gandhi, there's incredible power and feeling in that moment. I couldn't have articulated what I needed there, but when I could see it, in front of me, I knew it was exactly what I was looking for.

Dan Bootzin: We put the campaign together using an Avid 4000, a Macbased nonlinear editing system. Media Composer is the program we use. We use QuickTime to import an animated title from a graphics workstation and cut it in and play with it. For more intensive graphics we use Adobe After Effects, importing our work as a QuickTime file that goes into the final master.

Lee Clow: When Apple comes into play is when people are reaching a little bit higher for their human potential. That means computers will become even more accessible, whether that's by price or by the design of the products. It's always an evolution and a pushing. It's all about how much further you can take what you've always done.

Jessica Schulman: And now we've got the Macintosh G3. It's so quick and fast. I think it's incredible. From what I see happening, pretty soon they'll be faster than me. That would be a problem.

Lee Clow: Think Different has a lot of meanings for me. Think Different is, I think, Steve's original idea of the personal computer, a tool to allow you to think more productively. So Think Different, first, speaks to the dedication of personal computers. Think Different is also, be creative, imagine something that hasn't been done before. It's the "change the world" kind of challenge that Apple has always been part of. Personally, I hope the advertising campaign that we did, that celebrates people who artistically or imaginatively did creative things, could become part of the school curriculum so that kids don't forget what it means to think out of the box.

These Chiat/Day creative people also helped develop Think Different: Susan Alinsangan, Eric Grunbaum, Bob Kuperman, Margaret Midgett, Amy Moorman, Ken Segall, Craig Tanimoto, Ken Younglieb.

Think Different

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.

They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.

They invent.    They imagine.     They heal.

 They explore.     They create.    They inspire.
      They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world... are the ones who do.