People love their Macs. Apple computer owners know their machines send a certain message that says, "I am unique, I embrace creativity, I value decorating my apartment around my stylish new iBook." For years, the Apple brand has been associated with artists, writers and designers. The so-called "creative types" who seemingly belonged to this secret society of Mac users while the rest of the working public toiled in a clunky PC world.
Seeking to dispel the myth that Macs are only for a select group of people who’ve never touched a Microsoft product, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs asked long-time agency TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, to conceive of a campaign that could convince PC users that switching to Apple products would not send their digital lives into upheaval.
"Apple is one of those brands that is revered for great products and great advertising, but there is this perception out there that people can’t have [an Apple computer]," explains TBWA/Chiat/Day’s James Vincent, worldwide account head/producer on the latest Apple package.
Indeed, after an initial round of market research, Vincent discovered that people had a laundry list of fears associated with acquiring a Mac—everything from not being able to plug a printer into it, to an inability to e-mail friends who operated on a Windows platform. Their concerns were as basic as someone saying he or she couldn’t buy a five-speed automobile because his or her favorite brand of gasoline would not power such a vehicle.
Sounds silly, but the reality is that computers make most people uneasy. And because having one’s own personal IT department at home is not likely, why change something that sort of already works? That’s the kind of mentality Apple has been battling since the first Macintosh came on the market in 1984. Since then, its advertising has been less about battling the PC world and more about pushing the principles the company was founded on—creativity, self-expression, and a computer by the people, for the people. Its first television ad, "1984," out of the then Chiat/Day, and directed by Ridley Scott through now defunct Fairbanks Films—Scott is now with his own shop, bicoastal RSA USA—was a commercial manifestation of those principles that went down in advertising history.
In the late ’90s, once Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day teamed up again, the agency created the "Think Different" campaign, which celebrated people who thought they could change the world and did. But overall, the company has never gone directly after its IBM competitors, which is something Apple has been criticized for at times. "We kept getting e-mails from people saying, ‘Why don’t you just tell them it works?,’ " explains Vincent. "And with this, an idea was born."
FROM THE HORSE’S
MOUTH
How does a company say it’s better than its competitor without saying it’s better than its competitor? Let someone else say it. The Apple Web site (www.apple.com) has a link on its home page that invites people to tell their "Switchers" stories. They want to hear stories from real people who have switched from a PC to a Mac. "We had gotten so many e-mails from people from all different backgrounds and thought, ‘Let’s get them on camera,’ " recalls Vincent.
The first name that popped up in early conversations among Jobs, TBWA/Chiat/Day chairman/worldwide creative director Lee Clow and Vincent was documentary filmmaker Errol Morris —i.e. Mr. Death, and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control—who directs commercials out of bicoastal/ international @radical.media, and maintains his own production company, Globe Department Store, Boston, for other projects. "The thing about Errol’s films is that they’re unbelievably real without being boring. I get sucked in to watching it right until the end," says Vincent. "When we showed the films to Steve Jobs, he was certain that that’s what he wanted."
Being an Apple user himself, Morris had his own views about the Apple brand. "I’m a person who has forty Apples in this office," notes the director. "I know it’s a better computer but how do you convince people? And my answer would be that there is no one way to convince people. In the end it has to be a scattershot approach that covers a lot of things—the positive attributes of Apple products as well as the negative aspects of Windows."
During the planning phases of the campaign, Jobs had attended the Academy Awards and saw The Movie Movie, the short film Morris had done where people—famous and otherwise—talked about why they loved the movies. Afterwards, Jobs told Morris that it was exactly the type of format he was looking for to get his message across.
"It was a populace film," says Morris. "Populace because you have a feeling of the ‘everyman’ and that was an important ingredient in Apple as well."
The resulting nine-spot "Switchers" campaign features real people ranging from a disc jockey to an IT manager, standing against a white background talking about their experiences changing from a PC to a Macintosh computer. At the end of each ad, the person says his or her name and occupation, while a supered message reads "apple.com/ switchers." (Each spot is named for the participant—i.e. "Switchers/ Sarah Whistler.") When a consumer goes to the site, he or she can get additional information about what switching involves. It’s Apple’s opportunity to answer a lot of common questions without peppering its advertising with a top 10 list of why people can and should switch.
Probably the biggest coup for the campaign was when a Windows LAN Administrator named Aaron Adams wrote in with his switchers story. He says that after spending all day struggling to keep Windows machines running, he wanted to come home at night to something that worked. Obviously, he had a great story to tell, but no one was sure how he’d be on camera. According to Vincent, he got up there and was completely animated about his experience. "A lot of that is Errol," says Vincent. "He’s fantastic at getting people to say things."
A group of sixty people were culled from e-mails received on the Apple Web site. Morris and his crew shot more than 30 hours of film in Boston, New York and Los Angeles over the course of 10 days. During the shoot, the agency handed Morris bits of paper giving him a few details about the person being interviewed. Morris then deployed his patented "Interitron," which projects his talking image onto a teleprompter so that the person being interviewed feels like he or she is talking to a person, rather than a camera. "He thinks like a chess player," says Vincent of Morris’ interviewing techniques. "I would not want to play chess with Errol Morris."
Morris stayed very close to the editing process of these spots, cutting thirty of them himself on his own Avid, something he regularly does even if the agency has hired someone else to do it. "My joke is that I direct, but what I really want to do is edit," Morris relates. In this case, the campaign was ultimately cut at Nomad Editing Company, Santa Monica, by editors Glenn Martin and Jim Hutchins.
According to Vincent, Jobs intends to continue working with Morris in this format for future spots. "The idea was to create momentum with this campaign," explains Vincent. "What the next step will be is still unsure, but I have faith that the people involved will be smart enough to stop it before it gets boring."
At this year’s Macworld Conference and Expo in New York, Jobs screened a few of the ads that hadn’t been put on the air as part of his keynote address. The spots were less marketing-oriented and a little goofier than what’s been airing, but it was a way for Jobs to gauge his audience’s reaction and to have a little fun with the campaign. And so far, the feedback has been extremely positive, according to Vincent.
It’s this kind of momentum that will allow Apple to simultaneously promote all the aspects of its integrated business. For instance, the company has just opened a retail store in New York City’s SoHo district. If a potential buyer needs any hand holding, the store is a good place to start. And the Apple Web site has grown into a virtual community center for Mac owners wishing to extend their "digital life." It’s also an information hub for users and people thinking about making the switch. The commercials are even there for viewing as well as written testaments from switchers who are not featured in the television campaign.
"In the past, people bought Macs for creativity. The question for the future is to figure out what people are buying them for now," explains Vincent. "From our standpoint, we see the Mac becoming the center of the user’s digital life," says Vincent.
And Morris couldn’t agree more: "Because it’s integrated so many different kinds of things, it’s defining a whole new idea about how a personal computer can fit into somebody’s life."
