Think different
"Think different" is an advertising slogan used from 1997 to 2002 by Apple Computer, Inc., now named Apple Inc. The campaign was created by the Los Angeles office of advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day.[1] The slogan has been widely taken as a response to the IBM slogan "Think".[2][3][4] It was used in a television advertisement, several print advertisements, and several TV promos for Apple products.
For the song by Japanese composer Nujabes, see Metaphorical Music.As of 2020, "Think different" was still printed on the back of the box of the iMac.[5]
Formats[edit]
Television[edit]
Significantly shortened versions of the advertisement script were used in two television advertisements, known as "Crazy Ones", directed by Chiat\Day's Jennifer Golub who also shared the art director credit with Jessica Schulman Edelstein and Yvonne Smith.
The one-minute ad featured black-and-white footage of 17 iconic 20th-century personalities, in this order of appearance: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon (with Yoko Ono), Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog), Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso. The advertisement ends with an image of a young girl opening her closed eyes, as if making a wish. The final clip is taken from the All Around The World version of the "Sweet Lullaby" music video, directed by Tarsem Singh; the young girl is Shaan Sahota, Singh's niece.[13]
The thirty-second advertisement was a shorter version of the previous one, using 11 of the 17 personalities, but closed with Jerry Seinfeld, instead of the young girl. In order of appearance: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Martha Graham, Muhammad Ali, Alfred Hitchcock, Mahatma Gandhi, Jim Henson, Maria Callas, Pablo Picasso, and Jerry Seinfeld. This version aired only once, during the series finale of Seinfeld.
Another early example of the "Think different" ads is on February 4, 1998, months before switching the colored apple logo to solid white, where an ad aired with a snail carrying an Intel Pentium II chip on its back moving slowly, as the Power Macintosh G3 claims that it is twice as fast as Intel's Pentium II Processor.[14]
Print[edit]
Print advertisements from the campaign were published in many mainstream magazines such as Newsweek and Time. Their style was predominantly traditional, prominently featuring the company's computers or consumer electronics along with the slogan.
There was also another series of print ads which were more focused on brand image than specific products. Those featured a portrait of one historic figure, with a small Apple logo and the words "Think different" in one corner, with no reference to the company's products. Creative geniuses whose thinking and work actively changed their respective fields where honored and included: Jimi Hendrix, Richard Clayderman, Miles Davis, Martha Graham, Cesar Chavez, John Lennon, Laurence Gartel, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt and others.[15]
Posters[edit]
Promotional posters from the campaign were produced in small numbers in 24-by-36-inch sizes. They feature the portrait of one historical figure, with a small Apple logo and the words "Think different" in one corner. The original long version of the ad script appears on some of them. The posters were produced between 1997 and 1998.
There were at least 29 "Think different" posters created. The sets were as follows:
Set 1
Set 2
Set 3
Set 4
Set 5 (The Directors set, never officially released)
In addition, around the year 2000, Apple produced the ten, 11x17 poster set often referred to as The Educators Set, which was distributed through their Education Channels. Apple sent out boxes (the cover of which is a copy of the "Crazy Ones" original TD poster) that each contained 3 packs (sealed in plastic) of 10 small or miniature "Think different" posters.
Educator Set
During a special event held on October 14, 1998, at the Flint Center in Cupertino California, a limited edition 11" x 14" softbound book was given to employees and affiliates of Apple Computer, Inc. to commemorate the first year of the ad campaign. The 50 page book contained a foreword by Steve Jobs, the text of the original "Think different" ad, and illustrations of many of the posters used in the campaign along with narratives describing each person.
Outdoor advertisement at MacWorld 2000 Tokyo, etc.[16][17]
Reception and influence[edit]
Upon release, the "Think different" Campaign proved to be an enormous success for Apple and TBWA\Chiat\Day. Critically acclaimed, the spot would garner numerous awards and accolades, including the 1998 Emmy Award for Best Commercial and the 2000 Grand Effie Award for most effective campaign in America.
In retrospect, the new ad campaign marked the beginning of Apple's re-emergence as a marketing powerhouse. In the years leading up to the ad Apple had lost market share to the Wintel ecosystem which offered lower prices, more software choices, and higher-performance CPUs. Worse for Apple's reputation was the high-profile failure of the Apple Newton, a billion-dollar project that proved to be a technical and commercial dud. The success of the "Think different" campaign, along with the return of Steve Jobs, bolstered the Apple brand and reestablished the "counter-culture" aura of its earlier days, setting the stage for the immensely successful iMac all-in-one personal computer and later the Mac OS X (now named macOS) operating system.
Revivals[edit]
Product packaging[edit]
Since late 2009, the box packaging specification sheet for iMac computers has included the following footnote:
Macintosh Think different.
In previous Macintosh packaging, Apple's website URL was printed below the specifications list.
The apparent explanation for this inconspicuous usage is that Apple wished to maintain its trademark registrations on both terms – in most jurisdictions, a company must show continued use of a trademark on its products in order to maintain registration, but neither trademark is widely used in the company's current marketing. This packaging was used as the required specimen of use when Apple filed to re-register "Think different" as a U.S. trademark in 2009.[20]
macOS[edit]
Apple has continued to include portions of the "Crazy Ones" text as Easter eggs in a range of places in macOS. This includes the high-resolution icon for TextEdit introduced in Leopard, the "All My Files" Finder icon introduced in Lion, the high-resolution icon for Notes in Mountain Lion and Mavericks and on the new Color LCD Display preferences menu introduced for MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
Apple Color Emoji[edit]
Several emoji glyphs in Apple's Apple Color Emoji font contain portions of the text of "Crazy Ones", including 1F4CB 'Clipboard', 1F4C3 'Page with Curl', 1F4C4 'Page facing up', 1F4D1 'Bookmark Tabs' and 1FA99 'Coin'.
Other media[edit]
A portion of the text is recited in the trailer for Jobs, a biographical drama film of Steve Jobs' life.[21] Ashton Kutcher, as Jobs, is shown recording the audio for the trailer in the film's final scene.
The 2015 film Steve Jobs depicts a screening of "Crazy Ones" during the unveiling of the iMac G3. In addition to being seen on screen, the campaign is referenced by the story multiple times: The film's fictionalized version of Steve Wozniak compares himself to John Lennon before being visually juxtaposed with Lennon's frame in "Crazy Ones"; a mock-up poster including Alan Turing in the campaign is rejected when Jobs realizes that Turing is not recognizable (allowing another character to comment on the myth that Turing inspired the Apple Logo); and Jobs' daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs mocks the phrasing of "Think Different" as opposed to the grammatically-correct "Think Differently".
The Richard Dreyfuss audio version is used in the introduction of the first episode of The Crazy Ones,[22] a podcast provided by Ricochet,[23] hosted by Owen Brennan and Patrick Jones.[24]
Parodies[edit]
The Simpsons episode "Mypods and Boomsticks" pokes fun at the slogan, writing it "Think differently", a grammatically standard exclamation (which the slogan is not unless used as noun for the act of thinking).
For Steam's release on Mac OS X, Valve has released a Left 4 Dead–themed advertisement featuring Francis, whose in-game spoken lines involve him hating various things. The given slogan is "I hate different."[25][26] Subsequently, for Team Fortress 2's release on Mac, a trailer was released which concludes with "Think bullets".[27]
Aiura parodies this through the use of "Think Crabbing" in its opening.[28]
In the musical Nerds, which depicts a fictionalized account of the lives of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, there is a song titled "Think Different" in which Jobs hallucinates an anthropomorphized Oracle dancing with him and urging him to fight back against the Microsoft empire.[29]
In the animated show Gravity Falls episode "A Tale of Two Stans", a poster with the words "Ponder Alternatively" and a strawberry colored in a similar fashion as the old Apple logo shows in the background.[30]
In the movie Monsters, Inc., an easter egg magazine at the end of the film references the slogan with a computer captioned, "Scare Different."[31]
During Super Bowl LVI, Cutwater Spirits ran its first Super Bowl ad, "Here's To The Lazy Ones," which leaned into the laziness implicit in consuming its canned cocktails by depicting similarly lazy moves such as using a massage gun to tenderize meat.[32]