**Please note that this paper contains full references and footnotes that are not here for simplicity sake. If you'd like the full PDF that I wrote, please PM me and I'll be glad to send it to you.**

Popular culture is ever changing. Usually, what is popular today is passé tomorrow – however, there are a few instances of products and/or companies that remain popular for a prolonged period of time, and this paper focuses on one of them: Apple Computers. In order to understand Apple Computer in today’s market place and its popular culture revolution, one must understand Apple’s history and understand the premise on which Apple Computer exists.

   One of the most popular entrepreneurs and business personalities we watch all the time on CNN, read in the New York Times and listen to on NPR is Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Computers. Jobs was not the lone force in founding Apple Computers– he had a partner named Steve Wozniak. The two of them, based in Cupertino, California (which is still the city of Apple’s headquarters today), developed the first Apple Computer in an old garage, literally. The computer, built for hobby reasons and not business reasons, was developed to battle the Altair (the first home-based computer), and was named the Apple II. Realizing they had something potentially marketable, they debuted the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco in 1977 and was available for $1,298. To set the computer apart from all other home-based computers, the Apple II had color graphics (a first for a personal computer) and had an audio cassette drive for storage (also, a first). This computer first put Apple on the radar screen, and provided Jobs and Wozniak, who built this Apple II as a hobby, with full time jobs.

   Personal computers were catching on with the early adapters and technogeeks but for most consumers, there was no real reason why people should purchase an Apple II – other than having the coolest and hippest “toy" around. However, in 1979, VisiCalc was developed – the first spreadsheet program for computers and was released to support that Apple II, exclusively. This spreadsheet program turned a toy into a productivity suite – as most people now had a reason for buying the computer – not just for the toy aspect of it. Now, people started purchasing this for their home based computers but companies also were starting to adopt it for their offices. “VisiCalc took 20 hours of work per week for some people and turned it out in 15 minutes and let them become much more creative.” Demand from companies increased due to the benefits of this software, so they started purchasing Apple II’s and VisiCalc for the office. An interesting side note here is that VisiCalc was never patented – Dan Bricklin, the creator of the software didn’t believe software patents were feasible at the time so he passed up the opportunity of the patent. Today, Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel exist due to the missed opportunity of the patent.

   The computer industry was now blossoming, including the niche, personal computers. International Business Machines, or as we know them, IBM, was working with Microsoft’s Bill Gates to build an operating system for the companies up and coming personal computer. On August 12, 1981, IBM released their new computer, re-named the IBM PC. “The PC stood for ‘personal computer’ making IBM responsible for popularizing the term ‘PC’.” The first IBM PC was powered by a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor and came equipped with 16 kilobytes of memory, which was expandable to 256k. The PC came with one or two 160k floppy disk drives and an optional color monitor all for the price of $1,565, which would be close to $4,000 today. This IBM PC was the first PC that was built from off the shelf parts (called open architecture) and marketed by outside distributors (Sears & Roebucks and ComputerLand).

   The IBM PC had a brand new operating system called MS-DOS 1.0. To fully understand what an operating system is, please refer to the quote below:

operating system n. [techspeak] (Often abbreviated `OS') The foundation software of a machine; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been shaped primarily by the Unix, ITS, TOPS-10, TOPS-20/ TWENEX, WAITS, CP/M, MS-DOS, and Multics operating systems (most importantly by ITS and Unix).

This operating system allowed the IBM PC to be run from a command line – where users typed in commands, and the PC performed them. Little did people know, Apple was developing a brand new operating system, utilizing a graphical user face, or GUI. The GUI is a graphical user interface to a computer. There is a 99.9% chance that you have a GUI on your computer both at home and at work. The GUI presents an end user with windows, pull down menus, clickable buttons, scroll bars, icons, images and the mouse or pointer. According to Mary Bellis, the chief historian for Apple Computers on About.com, “the very first graphical user interface was developed by the Xerox Corporation at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s, but it was not until the 1980s when GUIs became widespread and popular.”

   In 1978, Apple Computer commenced on development of a business system that would complement their successful Apple II/III line of home computers. The new project was code named Lisa, unofficially after the daughter of one of its designers and officially standing for Local Integrated Software Architecture. Steve Jobs was completely dedicated to the development of the Lisa, until he was removed by then Apple President Mark Markkula to work on the Apple Macintosh product. The Lisa was released in January 1983 and was considered a major product failure due to high pricing and inadequate software support.

   To recuperate from this major failure, Apple Computers needed to develop and market the most advanced personal computer in order for their company to survive for the long term. Apple focused its efforts on the Macintosh product line, a line of computers that would be branded and mass produced for the world to buy. The marketing efforts for the Macintosh line would be much more main stream – not just geared towards tech savvy users. Little did Apple know what they had in store for them.

   The first Macintosh computers were all set and ready to be distributed in January of 1984. However, the marketing campaigns were not set for the introduction of the line, so Apple turned to its advertising agency of record, Chiat/Day. Toward the end of 1982, art director Brent Thomas and Steve Hayden came up with the idea of doing an ad campaign based on the timely tagline, “Why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” Chiat/Day shopped it around to a number of clients, including Apple, where it was supposed to be used for a print ad campaign in the Wall Street Journal for the Apple II. But Apple did not go for it, and the idea was filed away until the spring of 1983, when they met with the Mac marketing team to start working on the launch, which was scheduled for January 1984.

   Steve Jobs, the leader of the Macintosh team, wanted to launch the Macintosh line with an inspirational commercial that was as revolutionary to the product itself. He loved the Orwellian tagline when it was presented, and he encouraged the Chiat/Day team to pursue it. The Chiat/Day team put together a storyboard envisioning a visually striking, highly symbolic, miniature science fiction epic featuring a “young female athlete who liberates the subjugated masses from totalitarian domination by throwing her sledgehammer to smash a huge screen displaying Big Brother.”

   Macintosh marketing manager Mike Murray and Steve Jobs loved the proposed commercial but they needed to get new CEO John Sculley’s approval for such a large expenditure. Sculley was hesitant but gave the OK for a production budget of over $750,000 to make this one minute commercial. Chiat/Day hired the best science fiction oriented director they could find, Ridley Scott, whose previous movie Blade Runner, possessed the visionary feel they were striving for. Ridley was based in London, so Jobs and Murray decided to shoot it there, at Shepperton Studios. Several Apple executives traveled to London for the week of the filming.

   When the Apple executives arrived in London, Ridley had already put together a cast of over 200 to play the oppressed baldheaded workers that appear in the commercial. They were paid $125 per day to participate in the commercial. As for the woman with the sledgehammer in the commercial, it was hard to cast her since throwing a sledgehammer takes strength and physical aptitude which led them to finding Anya Major, an accomplished discus thrower. With everyone and everything in place for the filming, they shot the commercial without any flaws.

   With one and a half minutes of Super Bowl time purchased, they screened the commercial for the Apple Board of Directors in December of 1983. To Jobs’ and Sculley’s surprise, the entire board hated the commercial. Panicked, Sculley ran back to Chiat/Day to try and get them to sell back the ad time. Chiat/Day, still enthusiastic about their ad, was very hesitant, and only managed to sell off 30 seconds. Rather than take a loss on the 60 second ad, Apple decided to go ahead and run “1984.”

   The spot ran during the Super Bowl and many witnessed the groundbreaking commercial. For the week following the Super Bowl, talk shows and news stations ran the ad dozens of more times, totally in awe of the production and vision. Apple received over $5 million in free publicity from these re-runs of the commercial. The ad was such a big hit that it was ranked as the top television commercial of all time in a 1999 TV Guide survey. Why was this commercial so compelling to the general public? For one thing, the production values were simply amazing. The commercial was basically a Hollywood blockbuster movie wrapped into a one minute commercial. Everything from the casting to the director, to the filming, to the set design, all were done to the highest level of production possible. But beyond their production values, why else would this commercial go into history as the most visionary commercial ever?

   Apple had been advertising for years. According to Steve Hayden, creative director of Chiat/Day in the early 1980s, the spots before “1984” had never succeeded in communicating Steve Job’s vision of liberating the power of the PC. Previous campaigns for Apple included consumers giving self-deprecating testimonials to the power of the Apple II. Later campaigns were centered on what are called “lifestyle” ads, in which attract yuppies – including casting a young Kevin Costner as a spokesperson.

   These slice of life ads established what type of person uses an Apple – or, more to the point, what kind of person you can be if you too use an Apple, but they didn’t really clarify what an Apple is, or what distinguished it from other computers – especially as more and more computers with powers equal to the Apple II were entering the market. Early computer advertisers had avoided science fiction in promoting their products as they were afraid of intimidating their audience. However, you may find this strange as most computer early adopters were avid science fiction fans and fully associated with this subject. In the early 1980s and even today, when people think of science fiction, people associate it with Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was why IBM in some of its first PC campaigns ran as far in the other direction as it could, associating its products with Charlie Chaplin.

   This could be a huge reason why the board hated the 1984 commercial so much – and turned it down. Why promote a computer with a gigantic marketing expenditure using a “scare” campaign? “What 1984 did was tackle anxieties head-on. It turns the confusing complexity of the Information Age into a Manichean battle of good vs. evil. There’s the bad technology – centralized authoritarian – which crushes the human spirit and controls peoples’ minds. Read, IBM. But we can be liberated from that bad technology by good technology – independent, individualized – of the Mac.”

   We can break down the commercial in more depth, not just for the overall theme. Gender works very differently in this ad. The lone runner is female and everyone other human that appears in the ad is male. This includes all the drones sitting and the man (Big Brother) on the large screen. In the Manichean framework of the ad, women are on the side of angels. Manichean can be described as, “a believer in religious or philosophical dualism, from a religious dualism originating in Persia in the third century A.D. and teaching the release of the spirit from matter through strict self-denial.” By using this outline, the Mac user is now the underdog, which is the member of the oppressed group. It also distinguishes the Mac from all those other male identified computers. This basically backs up the fact that even though the very first computer programmer was a woman, Ada Lovelace, most to all of computing was essentially very male dominated. This was a bold and implicitly feminist step for Apple to take, in keeping with its California, counter-culture image.

   As a business move, the commercial not only focused on opening up the computer world for equal access for men and women, but it also put the Macintosh in front of a non-tapped niche of consumers: women. Gendering the Mac as female is natural, as it has “feminine” identified qualities which helped make the Mac seem more “user-friendly” for all users. The Mac was also more soft, curvaceous and user-friendly. Other computers were emotionless; the Mac was the personal computer. The Mac even booted up with a little computer with a smile on its face.

   If we examine Anya Major, the woman in the ad, we note that she’s an athlete, in clear control of her body. The “1984” star is an early example of a media image now ubiquitous with the rise of the WNBA: the woman empowering herself through achievement in sport, what we might call the “Reebok feminist.”

   In terms of faces in the commercial, we really don’t see anyone else but Anya Major. The big brother figure is hidden behind reflected glasses and framed by blinking letters and numbers. The storm troopers’ entire faces are covered by masks. The drones, or the mass of people watching the screen are covered in drab gray garments, some drones even wear what appear to be gas-masks. Compared to these figures, the running woman, unencumbered in shorts, sneakers, and tank top, might seem to represent the body freed from technology. All in all, Apple and Chiat/Day used many contrasting examples in this commercial.

   So what happened next after “1984”? Apple followed the spot up with an ad titled “Lemmings” that was a commercial flop. Mac sales which had already slowed by the end of 1984 continued to stagnate after the commercial was released during the 1985 Super Bowl and Apple fired Chiat/Day and moved its account to BBD&O. To most people’s dismay, there was no blockbuster Mac commercial under BBD&O for the 1986 Super Bowl.

   Popular culture isn’t sold on a specific service or product; it’s sold on an idea. Corporate advertising is an extremely complex undertaking, undermined by internal issues that the intended market would never understand and complicated by a customer base composed of individual humans, each with unique interests and needs. There is neither a single best message nor a single best way of reaching every single person out there, so the final result is a compromise that can never please everyone. Del Miller states in his essay, Selling Air: The Nebulous Advertising of Apple Computer, “I suspect that if you confronted the advertising managers at Apple with the complaint that, ‘Those ads aren’t persuasive!’, I suspect that the response would be, ‘so?’” Advertising for computers is primarily meant for one purpose – to build brand awareness, so when users are ready to purchase a computer, they know where to turn. The facts and figures aren’t as important as simply getting the prospective buyer to remember that Apple sells computers. Apple has used this concept in selling its computers – you rarely if ever see ads for MHz or amount of RAM, you see ads that talk about how Apple is different or how it associates itself with philosophers or with visionary thinking.

This way of marketing has caused a popular culture revolution amongst its following – it’s not about the numbers. Apple Computers has one of the most loyal following of any consumer brand. The following is considered a cult by some in the industry. By building a loyal following, Apple continues to service these consumers each time they need a new computer. Hayden suggests, “If someone were going to buy Apple, what would they be buying? It would probably be brand first and technology second. So, Apple has a great brand strength.”

Apple’s 1984 ad revolutionized their image and put them in the forefront of popular culture for not just the technology industry but the overall marketplace. When people associate great brands and popular products, Apple’s name always comes up within the top 5. The 1984 ad campaign put Apple on the map and introduced them to the world of the consumer, not just the world of techno-enthusiasts. The 1984 commercial helped them pave the way for possibly the greatest and most popular consumer electronics portable ever, the Apple iPod.