Think different

In 1984, Apple's "1984" Super Bowl advertisement was created by advertising agency Chiat\Day. In 1986, CEO John Sculley replaced Chiat\Day with BBDO.[6] In 1997, under CEO Gil Amelio, BBDO pitched to an internal marketing meeting at the then struggling Apple, a new brand campaign with the slogan "We're back." Reportedly everyone in the meeting expressed approval with the exception of the recently returned Jobs who said "the slogan was stupid because Apple wasn't [yet] back."[7]

Jobs then invited three advertising agencies to present new ideas that reflected the philosophy he thought had to be reinforced within the company he had co-founded. Chiat\Day was one of them.[8]

The script was written by Rob Siltanen with participation of Lee Clow and many others on his creative team. The slogan "Think different" was created by Craig Tanimoto, an art director at Chiat\Day, who also contributed to the initial concept work. The look and feel of the print, outdoor and the photography used was researched, curated, and visually developed by art & design director Jessica (Schulman) Edelstein who, together with Lee Clow, met weekly with Steve Jobs and the team at Apple to hone the campaign in its many forms. Susan Alinsangan and Margaret (Midgett) Keene were also instrumental in developing the campaign further as it progressed and spread throughout the world. Great contributions were made by professionals in all agency departments from account services, to art buying, to production, to contract negotiators and media buyers who secured key placements. The commercial's music was composed by Chip Jenkins for Elias Arts.[8]

The full text of the various versions of this script were co-written by creative director Rob Siltanen and creative director Ken Segall, along with input from many on the team at the agency and at Apple. While Jobs thought the creative concept "brilliant", he originally hated the words of the television commercial, but then changed his mind. According to Rob Siltanen:

Steve was highly involved with the advertising and every facet of Apple's business. But he was far from the mastermind behind the renowned launch spot...While Steve Jobs didn’t create the advertising concepts, he does deserve an incredible amount of credit. He was fully responsible for ultimately pulling the trigger on the right ad campaign from the right agency, and he used his significant influence to secure talent and rally people like no one I've ever seen before. Without Steve Jobs there's not a shot in hell that a campaign as monstrously big as this one would get even close to flying off the ground...it got an audience that once thought of Apple as semi-cool, but semi-stupid to suddenly think about the brand in a whole new way.[8]

Craig Tanimoto is also credited with opting for "Think different" rather than "Think differently," which was considered but rejected by Lee Clow. Jobs insisted that he wanted "different" to be used as a noun, as in "think victory" or "think beauty". He specifically said that "think differently" wouldn't have the same meaning to him. He wanted to make it sound colloquial, like the phrase "think big".[9]

Jobs was crucial to the selection of the historical subjects pictured in the campaign, many of whom had never been featured in advertising, or never would have done so with any other company. He enabled the selection and the speed of negotiation with them or their surviving estates. Some of the particular iconic subjects were chosen because of his personal relationships, calling the families of Jim Henson and John F. Kennedy and flying to New York City to visit Yoko Ono.[10] For the television narration, he called Robin Williams who was well known to be against appearing in advertising and whose wife refused to forward the call anyway, and Tom Hanks was then considered, but Richard Dreyfuss was an Apple fan.[11]

Two versions of the narration in the television ad were created in the development process: one narrated by Jobs and one by Dreyfuss.[11][9][12] Lee Clow argued that it would be "really powerful" for Jobs to narrate the piece, as a symbol of his return to the company and of reclaiming the Apple brand.[11] On the morning of the first air date, Jobs decided to go with the Dreyfuss version, stating that it was about Apple, not about himself.[8]

It was edited at Venice Beach Editorial, by Dan Bootzin, Chiat\Day's in-house editor,[8] and post-produced by Hunter Conner.

Jobs said the following in a 1994 interview with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing. It's to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better, cause it's kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

The Steve Jobs version of the ad was played at Apple's in-house memorial for him in 2011.

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.

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."[29][30] Subsequently, for Team Fortress 2's release on Mac, a trailer was released which concludes with "Think bullets".[31]

Aiura parodies this through the use of "Think Crabbing" in its opening.[32]

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.[33]

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.[34]

In the movie Monsters, Inc., an easter egg magazine at the end of the film references the slogan with a computer captioned, "Scare Different."[35]

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.[36]

• 1984 Super Bowl ad
• AppleMasters
• The organization of the artist

• Steve Jobs narrated version (video)