Apple Ad 1984

Apple ad 1984

Employees are discussing making a video to present their company

Emp1: Remember that Apple ad? 1984?

Emp2: Heard about it. Never seen it.

Emp1: Iconic. Opens in Dystopia where rows of drones are listening to a televised speech from a Big Brother face. A female athlete runs in, pursued by police in riot gear. She runs up to the screen and hurls a hammer at it, destroying it.

Emp2: OK. So you have a heroine striking a blow against an enemy. Message?

Emp1: David and Goliath? Apple and IBM? The struggle of creativity against conformity?

Emp2: OK. But what happened to the girl?

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Voice-over

Commercial designed by Chiat/Day. Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) directed it. Plot is classic mythology.Character development? Not a lot you can do in 60 seconds. But a great CM.

See the ad replayed here.

If you Google Apple

Tim and Larry discuss the health of Steve Jobs vs Sergey Brin.

...

Tim: We just don’t know. He’s an extrovert on stage, a performer, but when it comes to private issues like health, he plays his cards very close to his chest.

Larry: The worse it gets, the less he says?

Tim? Maybe. Maybe so.

Larry: Not in denial?

Tim: Who knows? Could be that. Could be his doctors don’t even know. Could be…

Larry: Unlike Sergey: Quiet guy. Says very little but then finds he might, might, I stress, have a gene predisposing him to Parkinson’s Disease. So what does he do? Comes out with it right there on his blog. Says it straight off.

Tim: Difference is, Steve’s unwell, and Sergey’s in great shape. Steve faces problems right now. Sergey may have years.

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Voice-over

Disclosure of information. Two different approaches. Steve’s approach is to control it, keep it under wraps until it can’t be contained any longer. Sergey’s approach is to come right out and say it.

Though, as Tim suggests, you may react to a present crisis differently to a future hypothetical scenario.

...

Installing AirMac Extreme

After three hours trying to get the AirMac Extreme base station to work on the wireless LAN, Steve calls up the AppleCare helpdesk.

 ...

Helpdesk: Click on the PPoE option.

Steve: What? Not the DHCP option?

Helpdesk: No, not the DHCP.

Steve: OK. The PPoE it is. Hey, that’s it! We’re on. Safari got the homepage! Three machines online! Now we can go back to some real work!

Helpdesk: Your case number is 4760721. Have a nice day.

Steve: You betcha. Think you could add some pictures to those dialogue boxes?

Helpdesk: I'll talk to my boss.

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Voice-over

Wrestling through it by yourself, coming to terms with terms like DHCP and PPoE, can take hours. Getting grumpy and often blaming the blameless. Even though some dialogue boxes carry arcane terminology and not enough pictures.

Consulting a expert who advises on this every day might only take a few minutes. Leaving time to triumphantly trumpet, “Now we can go back to some real work!” 

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ADD

Ziortza is recounting to Bernice her problems with yet another American Designed Device (as in Attention Deficit Disorder).

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Bernice: Problems?

Ziortza: Multiples. It’d got to the stage where I was using this brand new computer to sit on my desk and just display the time.

Bernice: A computer with a 2.4 Ghz processor, 3 gigabytes of memory and a 320 gigabyte hard drive and a 20 inch screen being used as a CLOCK?

Ziortza That’s all it could do. Installed the latest system called Leopard, ha that was a joke. It couldn’t even scare any applications into starting after installing it three times.

Bernice: Except the clock.

Ziortza: It could do the clock.

Bernice: So what did you do?

Ziortza: I called up the helpdesk. Spent four hours on there. Actually THAT bit was quite pleasant, chatting with these slightly robotic businesslike vocal avatars. Techie, intelligent, polite.

Bernice: What more could you wish for?

Ziortza: Er, a working computer? An Apple man is coming to pick it up on Thursday. That’s why they advise you to sign up for AppleCare. It’s not “if it can go wrong, it will go wrong”. More like “when it goes wrong on the first day out of warranty…”

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Voiceover

I worry a little about Ziortsa. She found chatting with the helpdesk people a pleasant conversational exchange? Admittedly, many helpdesk people are patient and pleasant. But to spend four hours with someone you’ve never met? No eating, no drinking, no eye contact, no gesture? Is this a future type of conversation?

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