By 1997, Apple was in trouble. The company that had launched the Macintosh with “1984” had spent a decade losing ground, cycling through chief executives and product lines. It had also lost the agency that made its most famous ad: in 1986, CEO John Sculley had replaced Chiat\Day with BBDO.
That year, under CEO Gil Amelio, BBDO pitched a new brand campaign with the line “We’re back.” It never ran. Steve Jobs had returned to the company he co-founded, and he wanted his old agency back.
Back to the agency that made “1984”
Chiat\Day, by then TBWA\Chiat\Day, returned to the account. Jobs’s view was that Apple could not win by arguing about processor speeds; it had to remind people what the brand stood for. The agency’s answer was not to talk about computers at all.
The slogan “Think different” is credited to art director Craig Tanimoto, who is also credited with choosing it over “Think differently,” a version Lee Clow rejected. The grammar was deliberate: “different” works as the thing you think, like “think big.”
On August 8, 1997, at Macworld Expo, Jobs introduced the new slogan to a crowd of Apple loyalists.
“Here’s to the crazy ones”
The centerpiece was a TV ad known as “Crazy Ones.” Over black-and-white footage of famous figures, a narrator read a short text celebrating “the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers” who “push the human race forward.” The script was written by Rob Siltanen and co-written with Ken Segall, with input from Clow and others at the agency and Apple.
The full-length version featured 17 personalities. A 30-second version used 11 of them and closed with Jerry Seinfeld. Across the TV spots and posters, the campaign honored people including Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, John Lennon, Martha Graham, Miles Davis, Cesar Chavez, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart and Jim Henson.
The posters
The campaign’s black-and-white posters, produced in 1997 and 1998, showed a single portrait with a small Apple logo and the words “Think different.” At least 29 were created. They appeared on billboards and bus shelters, and Apple sent sets of them to schools. At a special event on October 14, 1998, Apple gave employees a limited-edition book with a foreword by Jobs and the text of the original ad.
Why it worked
- It didn’t sell a product. At a moment when Apple’s products were not yet competitive, it sold an identity instead: Apple as the brand for creative people who see the world differently.
- It borrowed credibility. Associating the company with Einstein and Gandhi was bold, but it gave Apple’s loyal users something to be proud of again.
- It was simple and consistent. One portrait, one logo, two words. The campaign looked the same everywhere it appeared.
- The products caught up. The iMac arrived in 1998, and the campaign’s promise suddenly had something to point to.
Legacy
“Think different” ran until 2002, ending with the arrival of the iMac G4. It never quite went away: a version of the “Crazy Ones” ad narrated by Jobs himself was played at Apple’s in-house memorial for him in 2011, and the phrase has continued to appear on Apple’s packaging and website. It is one of the clearest examples of a brand campaign that changed how a company saw itself, not just how customers saw it.