PLAY : A CREATIVE by Juliane Chung

PLAY A CREATIVE

SPECIAL EDITION : CORPORATE WHORES

$10 USD

PLAY A Creative

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NOTICE What’s Inside 01

You Are Here The corporate advertising world invites you and hopes you find your way around with ease.

Meet The Creatives In order to aquaint you with the individual roles that comprise the creative dept. within a modern ad agency. *Take part as a photo editor by selecting and adding your own photos!

Manifesto An attempt to explain the intention and process behind creating this issue.

Sex Workers Gain Transparancy Through New Ad Campaign Q&A with the executive director of the sex worker advocacy group, Stepping Stone.

George Lois Q&A with a leading figure in the advertising world.

Steve Jobs Read about Steve Job’s modern vision for Apple’s advertising.

Design Elements Stickers and envelope included in case you want to send me something cool.

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MEET The Creatives Designer

Most agencies will have graphic designers on staff to assist the art directors and copywriters with campaign materials. They work on jobs that require pure design without the need for a concepting team.

PLAY Photo Editor

Photo Editor

Photo editors are typically responsible for selecting, editing, positioning and publishing the photos to accompany the text of the advertising campaign or magazine.

Copywriter

A Copywriter writes copy. This may include creating copy for taglines, jingle lyrics, web page content, television or radio commercial scripts, press releases, catalogs, billboards and other marketing communications media.

Creative Director

A Creative director develops and conceptualizes every aspect of an advertising campaign based on the client’s marketing plan. They generally gets the glory when a campaign is a success and takes the blame when it’s a failure. Special Edition : Corporate Whores — 03

PLAY Manifesto In an effort to pull a savvy generation of creatives back to print and away from their iPads, I have created an extremely overpriced, understaffed interactive print magazine. Thanks to the ever-evolving media world, I have never been more inspired to create something that doesn’t include a display screen and is authentic in concept and execution. Behold, an interactive magazine that encourages its readers to not only absorb the content but to be a part of it. Not only is the content chosen for those who appreciate good design, but the format has been scrutinized in order to cater to the creativity of its’ readership. Each article is accompanied by a different interactive element in order to provide an opportunity to its’ reader to play a different role within the creative department of an ad agency. If the page is meant to be interactive, it is specified in an upper corner with an icon that corresponds to the role in which the reader plays. Endless nights have been spent feverishly scribbling inebriated ideas on looseleaf and praying they’re worthwhile in the morning. The hope here is that reader engagement brings an even keener sense of appreciation for the selected editorial content and hell, to make the world a little more fun. PLAY is a sort of ongoing party in print. It’s a small party, but it’s the right one, and I’m glad you decided to drop in. This special edition entitled PLAY : A Creative is devoted to corporate whores. Those that are them, admire them and campaign for them. Each article offers its’ reader a chance to play a key role within the modern advertising agency. This issue is dedicated to my god fearing mother who once told me, “Somebody who is creative is a creator of sorts. God is the original creator, so to be creative is godly.”

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Sex Workers Gain Transparancy Through New Ad Campaign INTERVIEWER GREG BURCHELL PHOTOGRAPHER JAMIE CHUNG

STEPPING STONE

An advocacy group for sex-trade workers in Halifax has launched a poster campaign designed to humanize their image. Rene Ross, executive director of Stepping Stone, said the goal is to show that sex workers are everyday people.

A Halifax-based sex work advocacy group, Stepping Stone, is trying to remind people that prostitutes are people too with a new campaign featuring images such as a grandmother with the caption: “I am proud of my tramp for raising two kids on her own.” Three ads have been printed in local papers, and 500 posters have been put up across the city. The campaign launches as a high-profile case involving attacks on two sex workers makes its way through Nova Scotia’s courts. The Post’s Greg Burchell spoke to Rene Ross, the group’s executive director: How were the people in the ads chosen? The images were done pro-bono by a PR group. Two of the people were from the PR company, and the other one was my grandmother. Because of the stigma around the sex trade we were not able to get any models to volunteer to do it. We have a couple of students that would have made great models for the campaign, and they didn’t want people 06 — Special Edition : Corporate Whores

to think they were sex workers or it could impact their schooling, which they’re right, it could. The headlines you mentioned — have you actually read these? If we look at last week’s coverage of a trial a couple weeks ago, one of the headlines was all about ‘prostitute,’ it did not talk about anything about these women as women. ‘Killer arraigned in prostitute murders.’ ‘Alleged attacker goes to trial for prostitute beatings.’ You never hear that this is a woman, this is a mother, this is a friend. A lot of the stories and the angles continue to focus on the lives of the victims and the women and not their attackers. When we use terms like sex worker and sex advocate, it leads to more balanced stories. There still are a lot of local newspapers that use the term hooker in their headlines, and it doesn’t help to get the community to realize that these are people. We’re tired of the fact that we read headlines like, ‘Hooker and a Woman Killed.’ These new headlines on our posters are a way to show that

sex workers are not disposable. Why now? We know that a number of serial killers who have been caught over the years have come out and said that they targeted sex workers because they knew they could get away with it, that nobody would care about them. For example, Steven Laffin was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Nadine Taylor, a 29-year-old Halifax woman who disappeared last July. Taylor worked as a prostitute. Though Taylor’s body was never found, police later classified her case as a homicide. They said physical evidence and statements from witnesses led them to Laffin. Laffin is also charged with attempted murder, aggravated sexual assault, uttering threats, forcible confinement, and kidnapping in another case last August. The woman told CBC News she was working as a prostitute when she was attacked, bound with duct tape and stuffed in a trunk.

PLAY Copywriter

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LOIS GEORGE

He was one of the primary architects of the Creative Revolution in American advertising in the 1960s —yeah, yeah, like on Mad Men. He was a leading figure at the world’s first creative agency and cofounded its second.

INTERVIEWER ROCCO CASTORO PHOTOGRAPHERS TIMUR CIVAN & THE SELBY

Lois wholly or partially created some of the most exceptional and memorable ads in history. For better or worse, behemoths of consumerism such as Tommy Hilfiger, Jiffy Lube, ESPN, MTV, and many others have ingrained themselves in American culture because of his indelible campaigns. The qualities that set Lois’s work apart from that of today’s advertising industry are a) his stuff was unapologetic and transparent about the fact that it was selling a product, and b) he used ideas to hawk products rather than the other way around. Considering the breadth and quality of his advertisements, it’s all the more impressive that Lois is best known for his work at Esquire, where he created a staggering 92 of the most iconic magazine covers ever published in a massmarket magazine. They were visual battering rams, catalysts for dialogue about topics people found uncomfortable. With full backing from editor in chief Harold Hayes, Lois was given complete creative control. Sometimes Hayes didn’t even know what he was getting until the finished cover arrived. It was the type of arrangement that would be impossible in today’s sycophantic and flaccid media industry. Some have criticized Lois for exaggerating the scope of his influence and claiming other people’s ideas as his own. Regardless of the particulars, his work has undeniably had a lasting influence on the media world and will continue to until we’re all dead. Most journalists and television producers want to speak with Lois about his creative process or how he came up with so many unforgettable concepts. But I had a different agenda. I visited him at his stately full-floor apartment on West 12th Street in Manhattan to ask about his take on why the advertising industry—and, really, the media machine as a whole—has been cascading down a bottomless pit of mediocrity for at least the past two decades. Vice: Do you get pissed off that your advertising work is glossed over by people who only know you for your Esquire covers? 10 — Special Edition : Corporate Whores

George Lois: I really am a magazine lover. Magazines are great. I love the idea of picking them up, flipping through them, and looking at the ads. Sometimes you get knocked over, and other times you just say, “Piece of shit,” and drop it. When you get a good one and you’ve got it resting on your lap it’s like a lap dance. I’ve played with the iPad and it’s like the difference between looking at porn and having sex. But yeah, sometimes writers or filmmakers or whoever just forget about my main line of work. They never mention the advertising and keep calling me “the art director of Esquire during the 60s.” Other people just get it wrong… have you seen that film Art & Copy?

Magazines are great. I love the idea of picking them up, flipping through them, and looking at the ads. I’ve played with the iPad and it’s like the difference between looking at porn and having sex. Yeah, it’s that PBS documentary about creative agencies. I didn’t think it was particularly terrific. It was all over the place. I mean it was OK, but it was done by someone who doesn’t understand. Nice guy. Good documentary filmmaker, but he didn’t understand the Creative Revolution in advertising—what was going on in the 60s and how it all started. When they first edited it, the guy said, “We have 40 minutes of just you. We can’t do that. We’ve got to cut it down.” The whole thing felt conflicted, but it airs all the time. Every goddamn day I get phone calls from people who saw the movie. I’ve received hundreds of emails from young people who didn’t know me as

an advertising guy. They knew me as the guy who did the Esquire covers. I wasn’t ever at Esquire! I was an advertising guy who happened to do some good covers for them. I swear, it never stops. Are these folks disappointed when they find out the majority of your work was for the big bad advertising industry? Four or five years ago there was a memorial service for a great graphic designer by the name of Saul Bass. It was at Cooper Union in the Great Hall, where Lincoln spoke. Saul did amazing title sequences for films like Psycho and The Man With the Golden Arm. Anyway, I gave a speech about him, and then Martin Scorsese did a half-hour lecture about the importance of Saul’s movie titles. Afterward somebody was like, “Georgie, you ever meet Marty?” and I said, “No, I’ve never met Marty.” So the guy takes me to the other side of the room and there are like 200 advertising guys around Scorsese. We broke through the crowd and he introduces me. Scorsese went apeshit, like, “My God! I didn’t know you existed.” He started going on about the Esquire covers and how much he liked them. After about ten minutes of this he said, “Well, what happened to you? Why didn’t you keep doing it?” And I said, “What do you mean? I stopped doing that because it pays less than… You don’t understand. I’ve always been an advertising guy. I did those covers on the weekends to help out Harold Hayes.” Scorsese just said, “Oh.” It was like the air came out of the balloon— psshhooo—like I was a fucking sellout or something. It’s weird how people perceive me. Did you have any insight as to what the cover-selection process was like at Esquire before you stepped in? Was it a by-committee situation? I call it group grope. That’s a good name for it. How were you able to overcome their bad-idea orgies? Hayes called me up one day—he must have read about me in a newspaper or something because my agency was

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getting all sorts of press around then. He gave me a ring and introduced himself as the editor of Esquire and I said, “What the fuck do you want from me?” It couldn’t have been advertising, because editors don’t go begging for advertising. They do the work. A few days later I was having lunch with him at the Four Seasons—I was doing all of their design work at the time. He described how they selected a cover: “Well, I get my design staff and other editors…” He named like 12 people. “Once a month we all get together and discuss the new issue for an hour or so—what it should be about, the topic, etc. Then two days later everybody comes back in with ideas for the cover. We discuss them and argue and usually choose four of five to be mocked up.” I said, “Holy shit. Group fucking grope! Obviously you don’t have somebody there who can do it, because if you did one of your people would come in and say, ‘That’s the cover, motherfucker!’ And you’d all go, ‘Wow.’ You have to find someone from the outside.” What did he say? He was confused. “How can anybody outside do the covers for my issues, what we created?” he asked. I said, “Easy! I’m in advertising. I do advertising for products. I don’t do the product. They come to me, and I give them something that shows them I know more about their product than they do because I know how to sell.” I started to say, “Well, maybe this guy could do it.” Then he interrupted me and said, “Wait a minute, pal. You’ve got to do me a favor. You’ve got to give me just one cover.” That cover turned out to be the one where you called the championship fight between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, right? You picked Liston, who was the underdog by a long shot. The fight was coming up, and I knew the sports writers were full of shit. I knew that Vegas was full of shit. They had Patterson favored 10 to 1, but I knew Liston would just go into him and beat the living shit out of him. I 12 — Special Edition : Corporate Whores

just absolutely knew it. When I was younger I was the only white kid allowed to play ball in Bed-Stuy. I used to go see Floyd train a couple of blocks away. I knew he was going to get killed. What’s better than predicting a fight that everyone had wrong, for a men’s magazine? What I really want to know about is Hayes’s liability in all of this. There isn’t an editor working today who has balls that heavy. I’m not even sure it would get to that point, because of the whole group-grope thing you were talking about earlier. Most publishers are so nosy and paranoid that it wouldn’t get past the boardroom. When I showed it to Hayes he told me he really liked it but he was nervous. “You’re calling the fight against Patterson,” he said. “You’re crazy.” I said, “No, no. I’m not crazy. You’re crazy because you’re going to run it. Look at it this way: There’s a 50-50 chance I’m right. If I’m right, you’re a genius. Everyone’s going to look at you and say, ‘Wow. What an editor.’” Years later I found out that everyone—including the publishers—told him he was nuts and that there was no way he could run it. But he told them he’d quit if they didn’t run it. Hayes didn’t let me know what was happening over there. He was fighting the world, especially the ad people. Sometimes I did a cover and they lost ten advertisers in two days, but the circulation was going up, up, up. Hayes would say, “Yeah, fuck it, don’t worry about it,” and next month they’d pick up 10 or 20 advertisers. He was incredible. Did you have absolute free rein? There must have been some kind of process during which you discussed cover ideas. In the beginning Hayes would describe what was going to be in the issue over lunch. Sometimes he wouldn’t have half the articles, but he knew enough. I didn’t even take notes. Usually he’d say something about a story and I’d say, “That’s the cover. That’s what I want to do.” Other times he’d say, “There’s a lot of stuff in there about movies. It’s the

kids’ new religion. You’ve got to do a cover on that.” Sometimes I had to do this or that; it was obvious that I had to do something on a certain topic. But usually he didn’t know what I was going to pick. What are the tenets of a good magazine cover? Did you read that Annie Leibovitz book that came out a while back? Leibovitz at Work or something like that? It’s not a great book, but it’s interesting. There’s one very short chapter about “idea covers.” She said something like “George Lois is the master of idea covers. He did this and this and this. I did some too.” Then she said, “I really couldn’t keep doing them because Jann Wenner [cofounder and publisher of Rolling Stone] wanted covers that all looked alike and had a similar style.” It was this whole idea of You shouldn’t look at a cover and think too much. I don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. Everybody’s crazy. What’s a magazine about? At some point in the 70s everybody decided that magazine covers had to feature the face of the month, some fucking would-be star. Put 20 blurbs on it and the logo on top. You go to the newsstand and there are 30 or 40 magazines that all look the same. And there are people who defend it. Tina Brown [former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker] once said to me, “You know, George, you can’t do those covers today. There are so many magazines out there.” And I replied, “What’s that mean? Tina, if you took any one of my covers today and went to the newsstand it would knock your eyeballs out! Everything looks the same!” So you’ve got the ears of some of the most powerful editors in the world and they won’t even take your advice, which is proven. That’s really comforting. The American Society of Magazine Editors has this yearly conference where they all get together and jerk off and talk about where they are and where the culture is. So they invited me down a few years ago and asked me to talk about the Esquire covers and tell

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PLAY Designer

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everybody to stop doing terrible covers, or something like that. I was like, “So you want me to come down and bust balls? OK.” Just about every editor and publisher in America was there, and I just ripped their eyeballs out. Every magazine except maybe Vanity Fair and the New Yorker was complicit in the Iraq war. I gave them the whole thing about weapons of mass destruction and said, “Every one of you sons of bitches is complicit in what’s going on over there.” They were all, “Oooohhhh.” Ten minutes later I did a little bit more of it [mimes clapping his hands together to demonstrate their applause], and then half an hour later I really ripped into them about the war and I got a standing ovation. All the while I’m talking about why they can’t do good covers, and I’m showing mine at the same time. And in the end? Afterward there was a line—about 200 of them—waiting to talk to me. I’m signing stuff, and it’s all bullshit! They all keep doing the same crap. They’re not even trying. It’s so ignorant. Why would you want your magazine to look like the other guys’ magazines? It doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t you want to run a cover image that rips your lungs out?

Why would you want your magazine to look like the other guys’ magazines? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s both sad and absurd that at most publications so much goes into ruining a cover image. Tons of money is devoted to the marketability of these blurbs, when it could go toward funding good stories or something remotely useful. They’re very carefully researched. They test them: “Do you like this line better than this one?” If you have to 16 — Special Edition : Corporate Whores

depend on blurbs to have people buy your magazine then you’ve got a piece of shit! You don’t have a brand! You don’t design a magazine for your audience; you create a great magazine for yourself. I’ve had this discussion with editors like Graydon Carter. He could do great Vanity Fair covers. Graydon said, “We have very intelligent readers.” And I said, “Of course you have very intelligent readers, and you insult them with every cover!” This month it’s Lady Gaga on the cover! Everybody has a chance to use their covers to say, “Whoa, what a magazine!” and they don’t even try.

You don’t design a magazine for your audience; you create a great magazine for yourself. Do you think part of the problem is that magazines are afraid of losing advertisers and readers if they don’t choose covers that appeal to the lowest common denominator? I don’t think they sit there and say, “Gee, if we did a great idea cover we’d lose advertisers.” I don’t think they even think that way. Why would they lose advertisers by doing a good cover? Have you seen a single cover from the past few years that you liked? Once in a while, and it really thrills me. The New Yorker did two or three terrific covers over the last couple of years that really nailed what was going on. That terrific drawing of Obama and Hilary Clinton in bed together, answering the phone, was fucking good. David Remnick is a fan of mine. We had lunch once and he said, “Do you think I should do some photographic covers?” I said, “What? Are you fucking nuts? You’re the only mag that stands out or has a chance of standing out! You don’t fill it with blurbs; you

have drawings, which in many cases are whimsical and sweet. That’s terrific, but you should do a cover about something that happened last Thursday. Have somebody come up with a great idea on Friday, and then it comes out the next Monday. You’ll nail what happened!” Then he did three or four of them, and I said, “Jesus Christ, somebody’s listening to me!” But that’s about it. In a way, I feel like it’s exactly the same with modern ads. I have a theory that creative agencies—and there are exceptions, especially outside the States—lack conviction and are lazy. They play it safe and maximize profit margins by purposefully fucking things up or doing a mediocre job because some marketing goon on the other end has to spend his budget by the end of the year. No one has the guts to say anything provocative. What was different in the 60s? I started the second creative agency in America. The first was Doyle Dane Bernbach, and that’s where I came from. Bill Bernbach invented the idea of getting a terrific graphics guy to work with a writer and merging the energy between them to make great ads. That was his epiphany. OK, but were people less pussylike and not afraid to try something new? Or maybe all the good ideas are used up by now and we’ve entered an era of ubiquitous mediocrity? The 60s were a heroic period. And I really mean that. They were courageous. When I started the second creative agency everybody said, “Holy shit! There can be more than one creative agency.” Out of my agency came three other agencies in the next three years, and then there were five agencies, and that was enough to spur a revolution. Creativity was flourishing, and then I don’t know what happened. We hit some wall of bureaucrats—of guys selling out their agencies. Now there are basically three giant agencies in the world, and everybody belongs to one of them. I remember reading an article about the ad industry in a magazine a couple months ago about some agency

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run by this French guy who owns half the world. I can’t even remember his name. It was 12 pages without one mention of the word creativity and never talked about the actual products they were creating campaigns for. So no one’s doing it right today? No. Now it’s all about eight people sitting in a room, picking things together. What the fuck? Are you crazy? People think the way to be a successful executive is to get the right people around them and listen to their thinking and pick the best of their thinking. I don’t get it. I know it goes against the grain, but that’s certainly not the kind of creativity I’m involved in. I know it sounds terrible, but everything that’s great in this world gets done by one or two people together. My advice is to avoid group-analysis paralysis. Reject con and create icon.

My advice is to avoid group-analysis paralysis. Reject con and create icon. Back in the 60s everybody looked toward the commercials DDB and I did. A campaign for the entire year was $200,000, and the entire country would be talking about it. There are 50 companies in America today that spend at least $150 million a year on advertising, and you could look at their commercials and have no idea what product they’re advertising. I’ll be watching one today and say, “What the fuck was that?” You don’t know what they’re talking about. For some reason young people—or maybe everyone in the business—is afraid of looking like they’re selling something. They try to make pieces of entertainment. They don’t get to the point. But some advertising relies on the collaborative process, doesn’t it? It takes more than one or two people to shoot a

television commercial. You need a team for production, but a team for creating ideas? Get the fuck outta here! That’s impossible. It really is. Who’s to blame for this? I was teaching a class at the School of Visual Arts and half of the students are Korean and Chinese—they don’t even understand the culture, and I want to say to them, “What the fuck are you doing here? It’ll take you 30 years to understand what the hell goes on here.” Just because you learn the language doesn’t mean you understand the culture. I couldn’t be an art director in England. This kid gets up and describes a commercial that came out four or five years ago. There’s a young man with a woman in a bar and they’re drinking beer. Another woman starts walking over to them. She looks mad, he sees her coming, and then he switches beers with the woman he’s sitting with. The woman who walked over grabs his beer, pours it over his head, and walks away. Everyone said, “Oh yeah, that’s a great one!” I said, “What beer were they advertising?” They had a five-minute argument over the brand name. They didn’t know which beer it was. So what’s the secret to making a good advertisement? Make it simple. A great ad campaign has two mnemonics: There should be a visual one—somebody doing something—and something verbal. The big idea has got to have this synergy of memorability.

“A great ad campaign has two mnemonics: There should be a visual one—somebody doing something—and something verbal. The big idea has got to have this synergy of memorability.”

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JOBS STEVE

Perhaps no other modern-day marketer has captured the publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination like Steve Jobs. As he steps down as CEO of Apple, PLAY takes a look at some of the ads.

WRITER MATT CREAMER PHOTOGRAPHER ALBERT WATSON

If Simon & Schuster wanted to make a few extra bucks off “Steve Jobs,” it could bundle up the parts about advertising and turn it into the definitive manual on how to be a client. Jobs sure made plenty of time to for advertising -- three hours every Wednesday afternoon, during which time he’d meet with Lee Clow and James Vincent and others from their agency, TBWA Media Arts Lab, and his own staffers from Apple. Afterwards he might take them to Apple’s design studio to look at forthcoming products. That level of involvement is kind of amazing when you consider that he was spending the rest of his time running one of the most valuable companies in the world, an enterprise that involved tearing up half a dozen other industries in its pursuit of innovation. A selective speedread of Walter Isaacson’s book, which went on sale today, showed Jobs to be everything you would want in a client: a visionary who knew when to allow others’ vision to win out and a supporter of creativity without ever being a “yes” man. He loathed “typical ad agency stuff.” His deep relationship with Mr. Clow is already legendary, and the book, which features long passages on the creation of “1984” and “Think Different” ads, will only add to that legend. It is a portrait of someone who innately got marketing but also worked hard at it, putting time and effort and money and passion into the work and the key relationships behind it. Sure, he reamed out ad and PR folks left and right, but he never let short-term anger interfere with the long view. As such, the AppleTBWA union has been an outlier in a world where the client-agency relationships are dominated by impatience, fear of risk, bean-counting procurement processes, and tenures of marketing executives that barely outlive a fruit fly. Here are a few highlights from the sections about advertising: Early Days Jobs’ appreciation for the work of advertising and marketing went way 22 — Special Edition : Corporate Whores

back. Mr. Isaacson details an early meeting when the Silicon Valley publicist Regis McKenna that went very badly, mainly because Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak didn’t like the idea of a PR man touching his brochure copy. Jobs manages to the save the relationship, an important one and not only because Mr. McKenna knew all the right journalists. The ad operation of McKenna’s PR firm would eventually be purchased by a firm called Chiat/ Day, one of whose creative minds was, in Mr. Isaacson’s words, a “lanky beach bum with a bushy beard, wild hair, goofy grin, and twinling eyes.” That, of course, would be Lee Clow. 1984 When Mr. Clow, along with Steve Hayden and Brent Thomas, presented the idea for what would become “1984,” Jobs loved it. And at first so did John Sculley, Apple’s CEO for a decade beginning in 1983. But when the board saw the bleak but powerful ad that depicted a dystopian future, it balked and Mr. Sculley turned tail. He asked Chiat/Day to sell off the two Super Bowl slots it had purchased for the ad, one a thirty-second, the other a sixty. The move angered both Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak. They thought about buying the ad time with their own money, but they didn’t have to. It turned out Chiat/Day only sold the shorter of the slots. Mr. Isaascson quotes Mr. Clow as saying: “We told them that we couldn’t sell the sixtysecond spot, though in truth we didn’t try.” Good thing, because Mr. Scully eventually turned to then-marketing chief Bill Campbell for a decision on whether to air the ad. He went for it. Think Different Mr. Isaacson has something for all you grammarians bothered by Mr. Jobs and Mr. Clow’s apparent grammatical flub in not using the adverbial form of this classic line. It turns out there was plenty of debate over which part of speech to use. “Jobs insisted that he wanted ‘different’ to be used as a noun, as in ‘think victory’ or ‘think beauty.’” The

book quotes Jobs as saying, “’Think differently’ wouldn’t have the same meaning for me.” Mr. Isaacson also notes that the Seal song “Crazy” was initially considered for the campaign, but the rights couldn’t be obtained -- close one! -- and that two versions of the ad were shipped to broadcasters: one with Jobs doing the voice-over and one with Richard Dreyfuss doing it. It wasn’t until the day the ad aired that he made up his mind on Mr. Dreyfuss. Relationships: Clow As you’d expect, the relationship between Mr. Clow and Mr. Jobs comes off as one of mutual reverence. Mr. Jobs calls the beach bum “the best guy in advertising” and Mr. Clow asserts “There’s not a CEO on the planet who deals with marketing the way Steve does.” That didn’t mean that Mr. Clow eluded Jobs’ famous temper, and there are at least a few tales of the creative director getting reamed for picking a less-than-perfect picture of Gandhi or getting the wrong shade of blue in an iMac ad. But anger wasn’t the only emotion in play. In order to get Mr. Clow to work on “Think Different,” Mr. Jobs had to convince him to pitch the business. In 1997, he had just returned to Apple, which booted Chiat/Day right after Jobs left the company in 1985. The account was in review and Apple was talking to agencies like BBDO and Arnold. Mr. Jobs called Mr. Clow to see if he’d take a shot at the account. At first, Mr. Clow declined on the grounds that the agency didn’t pitch for new business and that Mr. Jobs already knew what they could do. Mr. Jobs countered that he didn’t want to seem like he was favoring an old crony. Mr. Clow relented and when he flew up to Cupertino to pitch “Think Different,” Mr. Jobs broke down. Here’s Mr. Isaacson quoting him: “Every once in a while I find myself in the presence of purity -- purity of spirit and loveand I always cry.... I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea, and I still cry when I think about it.”

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APPLE’S GREATEST ADS 01 “1984” 1984 This was the first commercial to introduce the Apple Macintosh personal computer. Now considered a masterpiece in advertising, “1984” is widely regarded as one of the most memorable and successful American television commercials of all time.

02 “Think Different” 1997 The words “think different” were created by Chiat/Day art director Craig Tanimoto. The text of the various

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versions of this commercial was written by Rob Siltanen and Ken Segall. The one-minute commercial featured black-and-white footage of 17 iconic 20th century personalities.

early spots? These ads, created out of TBWA/Media Arts Lab, used human interaction to display the differences between the PC and the Mac.

“Stacks” 2007 In 2007 the Nano arrived, and along with it the mass introduction of Canadian singer-songwriter Feist in a spot that subtly but perfectly illustrated how small the device could go.

“Silhouettes” 2003 This came during reign 2.0 for Jobs, when he invented the market for portable digital music players. The most memorable iPod ads featured silhouettes dancing to catch pop songs.

04 “Mac vs. PC” 2006 Is it just us, or do John Hodgman and Justin Long look so young in these

03 04

“Quotes” 2007 - 2008 After striking gold with its “Mac vs. PC” TV spots, Apple spent the better part of 2007 and 2008 dominating the online space. It created a series of rich-media banner ads out of TBWA and its Media Arts Lab starring “Mac” and “PC.” In this ad, the bespectacled “PC” climbs a ladder and staples a “Not” sign to the end of a Wall Street Journal Leopard-favoring comment on top of the page in what amounts to a nifty interactive trick that outshines those in a standard rollover banner ad.

“Calamari” 2007 Because it’s not the ad, it’s the product, as made clear by this blissfully simple ad promoting the introduction of everything the iPhone can do.

08 “Funnest” 2008 Another rich-media gem, Apple celebrated the launch of its iPod Touch, which gave other portable gaming competitors a run for their virtual currency, with a series of online ads that manipulated the entire site the user was visiting.

09 “Envelope” 2008

07 08

When Apple introduced the MacBook Air, it called upon the oldest illustrative trick in the book. The size of this thin, graceful new laptop is approximately that of an inter-office envelope.

10 “Meet iPad” 2010 Jobs harkened back to the original iPhone commercials in which the star is the product and all it can do, set to a catchy soundtrack.

11 “Meet Her” 2010 Apple shows yet again that it is a master of the heartstrings.

Special Edition : Corporate Whores — 25

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