Inside Steve's Brain (15 page)

The minute Jobs unveils the product, Apple’s marketing machine begins its advertising blitz. The secret banners at Macworld are unveiled, and immediately the front door of Apple’s website showcases the new product. Then begins a coordinated campaign in magazines, newspapers, radio, and TV. Within hours, new posters go up on billboards and bus stops all over the country. All the ads reflect a consistent message and styling. The message is simple and direct: “One thousand songs in your pocket” is all you need to know about the iPod. “You can’t be too thin. Or too powerful” sends a clear message about Apple’s MacBook laptops.

Jobs’s Apple is obsessively secretive. It’s almost as secretive as a covert government agency. Like CIA operatives, Apple employees won’t talk about what they do, even with their closest confidants: wives, boyfriends, parents. Employees certainly will not discuss their work with outsiders. Many won’t even refer to the company by name. Like superstitious theater folk who call
Macbeth
the “Scottish play,” some Apple employees call it “the fruit company.”

Talking out of school is a firing offense. But many employees don’t know anything anyway. Apple staffers are given information on a strictly need-to-know basis. Programmers write software for products they’ve never seen. One group of engineers designs a power supply for a new product, while another group works on the screen. Neither group gets to see the final design. The company has a cell structure, each group isolated from the other, like a spy agency or a terrorist organization.

In the old days, the information flowed so fast out of Apple that the legendary trade publication
MacWeek
was known as MacLeek. Everyone, from engineers to managers, was feeding information to the press. Since Jobs’s return, Apple’s 21,000 employees as well as dozens of suppliers are extremely tight-lipped. Despite dozens of reporters and bloggers sniffing around, very little good information leaks out about the company’s plans or upcoming products.

In January 2007, a judge ordered Apple to pay the $700,000 in legal fees of two websites that reported details of an unreleased product code-named “Asteroid.” Apple had sued the sites in an attempt to learn the identity of the person in its ranks who leaked the information, but lost the case.

Some speculated that Jobs sued the websites to keep the press in line. The lawsuit was seen as press intimidation, a scare tactic designed to intimidate the press from reporting rumors. Much of the public discussion concerned press freedom and whether bloggers have the same rights as professional reporters, who enjoy some protection under laws that shield journalists. This is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation took on the case and turned it into a cause célèbre—to protect press freedom. But from Jobs’s point of view, the case had nothing to do with press freedom. He sued the bloggers to scare the shit out of his own employees. He was less concerned with gagging the press than gagging staff who leaked to the press— and anyone who might think of doing it in the future. Apple’s buzz marketing is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Jobs wanted to check the leaks.

Some of Jobs’s secrecy measures get a little extreme. When Jobs hired Ron Johnson from Target to head up Apple’s retail effort, he asked him to use an alias for several months lest anyone get wind that Apple was planning to open retail stores. Johnson was listed on Apple’s phone directory under a false name, which he used to check into hotels.

Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, said he’s not allowed to tell his wife or kids what he’s working on. His teenage son, an avid iPod fan, was desperate to know what his dad was cooking up at work, but Daddy had to keep his trap shut lest he get canned. Even Jobs himself is subject to his own strictures: he took an iPod hi-fi boombox home for testing, but kept it covered with a black cloth. And he listened to it only when no one else was around.

Apple’s obsessive secrecy is not a quirk of Jobs’s control-freak tendencies; it’s a key element of Apple’s extremely effective marketing machine. Apple makes millions of dollars in free advertising every time Jobs steps onto a stage to reveal a new product. Many have wondered why there are no bloggers at Apple. It’s because loose lips at Apple sink ships. But there are dozens of bloggers at Pixar, even before Jobs sold Pixar to Disney. Pixar bloggers happily gossip about all aspects of Pixar’s projects and their work lives. The difference is that Pixar’s movies don’t rely on a surprise unveiling to get press. New movies are routinely reported in the Hollywood trade press. Jobs isn’t a control freak for the sake of it; there’s a method to his madness.

Jobs has been very successful at creating a persona for Apple. Through advertising, he has shown the public the things he, and Apple, stands for. In the late 1970s, it was revolution through technology. Later it was about being creative, thinking different. Jobs’s personality allows Apple to market itself as human, and cool. His personality is the raw material of Apple’s advertising. Even an agency like Chiat/Day could never ever make Bill Gates look cool.

Apple’s advertising has done a good job at conveying the company as an icon of change, of revolution, and of bold thinking. But it does so in a subtle, indirect way. Apple rarely brags. It never says, “We’re revolutionary. Really.” It uses the storytelling of its advertising to convey this message, often as a sub-text.

Take the iPod silhouette ads. The imagery of the campaign was fresh and new; it didn’t look like anything that came before. “They always have this freshness in graphic design. The look is very simple and very iconic. It’s so distinctive that it has a look to itself,” advertisng journalist Warren Berger, author of
Advertising Today
and
Hoopla
, told me in a telephone interview.
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Berger said the best way to get creative advertising is to hire the most creative agency. Chiat/Day is one of a handful of the most creative agencies in the world, but the real trick is to communicate what the brand is about. “Lee Clow and Jobs understood each other so well, they became buddies,” said Berger. “Clow really got the culture of Apple, the mind-set. He really understood what they were trying to do. And Jobs gave Clow total creative freedom. He allowed Clow to show him anything no matter how crazy it might seem. It really allows people to push the boundaries. IBM could never do that. They would never give Chiat/Day the freedom that Jobs gave them.”

In 2006, Hewlett-Packard started to do very good advertising, with campaigns that featured people, not computers, in spots that looked like they may have come from Apple. In one of HP’s “The Computer Is Personal Again” TV spots, the hip-hop star Jay Z shows viewers the contents of his computer, which is conjured up as a 3D special effect between his gesticulating hands. His face is never shown.

Hewlett-Packard hired Goodby Silverstein, another superstar agency. The ads were interesting and very well done, but they never had the strength of personality of Apple’s ads, because
the company
doesn’t have the strength of personality. No matter how the ads tried to personalize HP the corporation through celebrities like Jay Z, it still felt like a company. Apple is more of a phenomenon than a company. Hewlett-Packard can never be quite as magical because it doesn’t have a personality. The same thing happened to Apple when Jobs left in 1985. “When Steve left, Apple became a company again,” said Berger. “The advertising was good, but it didn’t have that magic. It didn’t look like the same company. It wasn’t a phenomenon. It didn’t feel like a revolution. It was just trying to stabilize things.”

Between the big, bold, brand-building campaigns, like “Think Different” and the iPod silhouettes, Apple mixes in more traditional product advertising. These product promotions focus on specific products, like the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” campaign, which dramatized why it makes sense to buy an Apple computer.

The campaigns represented the rival Mac and Windows platforms as two people. Up-and-coming actor Justin Long personified the effortlessly cool Mac, while comedian and author John Hodgeman represented the nerdy, accident-prone PC. In one spot, Hodgeman has a cold. He’s contracted a virus. He offers Long, the Mac, a handkerchief, which he politely declines because Macs are largely immune to computer viruses. In thirty seconds, the spot cleverly and economically conveyed a message about computer viruses. The ads create a memorable, dramatic situation—more so than HP’s individuals showing the contents of their computer.

Like “Think Different,” the campaign had a big impact. It enjoyed a high profile and was widely parodied—a good measure of a campaign’s cultural impact.

“They create this stuff that gets into the culture,” said Berger. “Soon enough people are talking about it, and he gets into others’ advertising. You see the same layouts, the same motifs, in other ads, in magazine and newspaper layouts. There’s a whole graphic design look; suddenly other advertisers have embraced it. The ‘Think Different’ posters. People put them on their wall. That’s really successful advertising. The ads became a phenomenon. You didn’t have to pay people to pass it around.”

Not everyone loves Apple’s advertising. Seth Godin, author of several best-sellers about marketing, said Apple’s advertising has often been mediocre. “I’m underwhelmed by most of Apple’s advertising,” he told me by phone from his office in New York. “It’s not been effective. Apple’s advertising is more about pandering to the insiders than acquiring new users. If you have a Mac, you love Apple’s advertising because it says ‘I’m smarter than you.’ If you don’t have a Mac it says ‘you’re stupid.’ ”
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The “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads have been described as unbearable smug. Many critics couldn’t stand Justin Long’s self-consciously hip Mac character, who had the poise and self-assurance that annoys some people. The stubble and a casual hoodie added to the irritation. Many in the target audience identified more with Hodgeman’s nebbish PC character, who was endearingly bumbling.

“I hate Macs,” wrote British comedian Charlie Booker in a critique of the ads. “I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did.... PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, ‘I hate Macs’, and then I think, ‘Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?’ ”

Booker said the campaign’s biggest problem is that it “perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow ‘define themselves’ with the technology they choose.”

He continues, “If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that ‘says something’ about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe— but not a personality.”
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Conversely, the “Switchers” campaign, which ran in the early 2000s, was ripped for portraying Apple customers as losers. The campaign, shot by Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris, featured a series of ordinary people who had recently switched from Windows computers to Macs. Looking straight into Morris’s camera, they explained the reasons they switched, the problems they had been having with Windows, and rhapsodized their new love affair with the Mac. Trouble was, most seemed like they were running away from their problems. They couldn’t cope, and they had given up.

“Apple couldn’t have picked a starker collection of life’s losers with which to promote the Macintosh,” wrote journalist Andrew Orlowski.
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“The message is a mass of conflicting signals. Having portrayed the Mac as the computer for over-achievers, it’s now suggesting that it’s a kind of refugee camp for life’s most bitter losers.”

The “Think Different” campaign was criticized for using noncommercial figures, people who patently didn’t believe in commercial culture. It even included committed nonmaterialists like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, who actively opposed commercialism. These figures would never endorse a product in a commercial—and here Apple was using them to endorse products. A lot of critics couldn’t believe Apple’s chutzpah and thought the company had stepped over the line.

In Apple’s defense, Clow told the
New York Times
that Apple intended to honor the subjects of the campaign, not exploit them. “We’re not trying to say these people use Apple, or that if they could’ve used a computer, they would’ve used Apple. Instead, we’re going for the emotional celebration of creativity, which should always be part of how we speak about the brand.”
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Allen Olivio, an Apple spokesperson at the time, said: “We would never associate these people with any product; it’s Apple celebrating them versus Apple using them. To say that Albert Einstein would have used a computer would cross the line. Why would he need one? But it’s different to say he looked at the world differently.”
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Berger, the ad critic, said he loved the “Think Different” campaign. “American culture is very commercial. This stuff gets jumbled up. Quentin Tarantino talks about Burger King. Apple makes a poster of Rosa Parks. That’s our culture. People are free to use anything from wherever they want.”

Lessons from Steve: