To look at
On the one-year anniversary of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs' untimely death, we scrounged up a baker's dozen of early Apple ads in the accompanying photo gallery for your amusement and edification. They're print ads in particular, since it was pretty early days to be advertising computers on television. Still, most them wouldn't be recognizable as Apple ads if not for the name and early logos.
They weren't especially worse than other computer ads at the time. Maybe they were even marginally better. But they were anything but special, let alone cool.
What's interesting is not just that Apple's early ads look so depressingly conventional. It's that a few of them revealed flashes of Jobs' future marvels of marketing. Once Jobs got past the initial "speeds and feeds" marketing imperative during a time when Apple was really just one (albeit prominent) competitor in a sea of pre-Windows, pre-Mac personal computer makers, he began to develop an eye for brand marketing that few companies in technology or any other industry have since surpassed.
Take a close look at these early ads, and you can see that Apple's evolution to the pinnacle of brand marketing happened not in a straight line, but in a sort of punctuated equilibrium that parallels the gradual maturing of computing itself. At first, PCs were for hobbyists interested in performance and features, and the ads reflected that. But as the machines began to sell into the millions, Apple's ads began to emphasize how they were "the computer for the rest of us," as the first Macintosh ads called them.
That first ad for the Apple-1 in 1976, rivetingly entitled "A Balance of Features," was appallingly amateurish. The ad, released only a few months after Jobs and Steve Wozniak showed the prototype at the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley and incorporated their company, was stuffed full of technical features in a way that's unimaginable today. For instance, the ad touted the ability to attach a keyboard and monitor to allow "the efficient entry and examination of programs in hexidecimal notation." Who knew?
There was even a misspelling in the first line, a sign that Jobs' famous perfectionism hadn't quite kicked in yet. (Or perhaps there was no one else there at the time for Jobs to fire.) The one marketing technique employed, and it wasn't much, was the price: $666.66. It wasn't a reference to the number of the beast, as some people speculated. Rather, it was Jobs' attempt to draw attention to the product through numerical repetition. The ad's only upside: It featured Apple's first, gloriously over-the-top logo.
Another early ad the next year for the much more mainstream Apple II pictured a woman preparing a meal, gazing adoringly at her mate working on the Apple computer on the kitchen table. This time, the messaging was far simpler, saying only, "Introducing Apple II." One interesting detail: The guy is wearing a turtleneck shirt, later to become Jobs's sartorial signature.
Not all the advertising was so unsophisticated, at least by today's standards. Indeed, one striking departure (not pictured in this collection) was a 1977 spot introducing the Apple II that anticipated much later Apple ads. Under the short headline "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication," it featured a single photo of the computer on a white background. It wouldn't look out of place today.
Another ad, from 1979, was simply strange. It featured a naked man (sans even a turtleneck) with only an Apple computer covering his private parts, above the headline, "We're looking for the most original use of an Apple since Adam." In what must be one of the earliest examples of ad crowdsourcing, it offered a week in Hawaii to anyone who could write up the most interesting use for an Apple. Eat your heart out, Facebook.
"How to buy a personal computer" the same year reemphasized the Apple II marketing mantra that Apples aren't just for business and can handle both business and home tasks. Nothing special except one thing: another guy in a turtleneck. Really! Yet another 1979 ad also launched Apple's savvy courting of students and teachers by calling the Apple "the educational computer." Besides that, the ad looks pretty conventional.
A series of ads in 1981, though, presaged a theme to which Jobs would return with much more style nearly two decades later. One, featuring a sepia-toned, faux historical photo of a young Henry Ford in a workshop with an Apple, compared the product to the Model T for its ease of use. Another pictured a Thomas Edison stand-in. Both men, the real McCoys, were featured in the "Think Different" campaign in the late 1990s.
The first 1984 ad introducing the Macintosh, whose offspring remain a foundation for Apple's product line, regressed to geekspeak with a cutaway diagram of the machine's innards. Perhaps that was appropriate given the revolutionary nature of the Mac's graphic user interface and mouse input that Jobs borrowed from
But later that same year, Mac ads began displaying the simple, clear images that have remained a fixture of Apple marketing ever since. One example: A hand wearing a driving glove on a mouse, with the headline, "Test drive a Macintosh."
Jobs didn't last at Apple much longer, as he fell to a palace coup in 1985 by John Sculley, the CEO he had wooed from Pepsi. You could almost feel his departure, not just in marketing but in product conception, in far too many ads appearing in following years. A decidedly mundane ad in 1986, for instance, pitched MacCharlie, an ill-conceived Mac add-on that let users run the DOS software used in
If you're looking for a longer stroll down memory lane, you can find many more examples here and here. It's quickly apparent from the volume of ads that Jobs saw advertising as critical to Apple's ability to set itself apart from the pack. The company's success no doubt grows chiefly from the actual hardware and software, especially after Jobs' return to Apple in 1997, but ads were an indispensable part of Jobs's success at turning Apple into an iconic brand.
Even today, Apple issues some clunkers, such as the recent "Genius" Olympics ads that rubbed so many people the wrong way and quickly got cancelled. But inevitable flubs aside, Steve Jobs' legacy of ads that inspired and cemented loyalty to the Apple brand will likely continue to set the standard for effective marketing for a long time to come.
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Read more:
Apple's Most Unforgettable Ads
Untold Stories About Steve Jobs: Friends And Colleagues Share Their Memories
