by Michelle Lentz
Yesterday was the 25th Anniversary of the classic “1984″ ad from Chiat/Day about the Macintosh. It’s an incredibly famous ad, yet it aired only once, during Super Bowl XVIII.
According to a CNBC interview with then-marketing manager Mike Murray, the Apple Board had instructed them to never show the ad and sell the TV spots.
The ad, of course, made history:
CNBC: So the ad runs. What was the reaction?
Murray: Well, we had to somehow show people and we wanted this radical commercial simply to get people’s attention and to enter the word Macintosh into the lexicon of their vocabulary. We achieved that. In fact we overachieved that. The commercial in its entirety was shown as nightly news on the three major networks, which in those days were NBC, ABC and CBS. We moved from being public relations and advertising to actually news. Suddenly, it became something all of America needed to be paying attention to. We showed up on the cover of Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. It lifted the perception of apple as an innovator and it opened the door for thousands and thousands of Macintosh computers to be sold.
Happy (belated) Birthday to a ground breaking commercial!
__
Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology
Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net