Photo credit: Steve Hayden via Business Insider
Before Apple even filmed the famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial, the company’s ad agency needed buy-in from Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and then-CEO John Sculley. The technology executives were shown a storyboard of a series of pictures that described what the ad would look like when it was actually being filmed. Fortunately, Steve Jobs loved the idea when they showed it to him.
Directed by Ridley Scott, it first aired in 10 local outlets, including Twin Falls, Idaho, where Chiat\Day ran the ad on December 31, 1983, at the last possible break before midnight on KMVT, so that the advertisement qualified for 1983 advertising awards. Its second televised airing, and only national airing, was on January 22, 1984, during a Super Bowl XVIII break in the third quarter by CBS.
- WHY IPAD — Colorfully reimagined and more versatile than ever, iPad is great for the things you do every day. With an all-screen design, 10.9-inch...
- IPADOS + APPS — iPadOS makes iPad more productive, intuitive, and versatile. With iPadOS, run multiple apps at once, use Apple Pencil to write in...
- FAST WI-FI CONNECTIVITY — Wi-Fi 6 gives you fast access to your files, uploads, and downloads, and lets you seamlessly stream your favorite shows.
In one interpretation of the commercial, “1984” used the unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by her white tank top with a stylized line drawing of Apple’s Macintosh computer on it) as a way to save humanity from “conformity” (Big Brother). These images were an allusion to George Orwell’s noted novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised “Big Brother”.
