Think Different

I came across this video in the NYTimes Bits blog this morning. The video, which I've embedded below, shows Steve Jobs in 1997 launching the "Think Different" campaign. It's funny in these days when everyone has an iPod, every college student is equipped with a MacBook, and I use an Apple-made cell phone that I still think of Apple the way Steve Jobs talks about it 13 years ago: as underdogs and visionaries.

Apple's most iconic ad was the famous 1984 ad, and Jobs mentions that in the video. But based on my preceptions of the company nearly 15 years after this campaign aired and probably a decade since it ended, I think you can make a very good argument that this was a more successful series of ads.

I'm not a fan of advertising, and to be honest I find marketing kind of distateful, but what I admire is the successful communciation in Apple's ads. I think most people, regardless of what they think about Apple's products, perceive the company in much of the same way as Apple's consumers and fans do: as outside the mainstream despite being mainstream. I'm looking at this video and reflecting on Apple's old ad campaigns not as an exercise in successful marketing, but as an exemplar of creative communication.

When writing, I often struggle with how to show a reader a scene, or an idea. Over the the years I've come to realize that the only way to do this is to write invisibly. You can tell your audience about the staircase and how grand it is all you want, but the manner of the description and the way it interacts with the story is going to tell the audience far more. Professor E.S. Rabkin once said in his class (and I hope he will forgive me because I am sure I am about to misquote him) that the greatest sentence in Science Fiction was "The door irised closed behind him," for this very reason. These few words tell us boat loads about the door and the world that door exists in without ever addressing either.

This is why I find these ads so noteworthy. They say so much about the company, how it perceives itself, and how it wants to be perceived without ever talking about the company. I need to take notes.