Brand
Apple ads
Apple's best ads, from "1984" and "Think Different" to Shot on iPhone: work that defines Apple against rivals, then lets the product prove itself.
All ads
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2023R.I.P. Leon
A neighbourhood lizard-sitter finds his charge, Leon, lying motionless and anxiously texts the terrible news.
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2018Welcome Home
FKA twigs plays a woman who drags herself home after a draining day, asks Siri on her HomePod for some music, and dances as her cramped apartment…
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2015Shot on iPhone ("World Gallery")
The largest photography exhibition ever mounted — as an ad campaign.
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2006Get a Mac ("Mac vs. PC")
Sixty-six spots, one white void, two guys.
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2003iPod Silhouettes
Black silhouettes dancing against vivid flat colour, with only one detail picked out: a white iPod and its white earphone cord.
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1997Think Different ("The Crazy Ones")
A manifesto in place of a product.
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19841984
A product launch staged as dystopian cinema.
Apple’s advertising
Chiat/Day made "1984", TBWA\Chiat\Day made "Think Different" and the iPod posters, and TBWA\Media Arts Lab made much of the later work. In 2023 the company's in-house team won a Cannes Grand Prix of its own.
The early work defines Apple by what it is against. 1984 cast IBM as Big Brother and showed no product in use, and Think Different showed no computers at all, only the "crazy ones" who change the world. Get a Mac later turned the rivalry into a sitcom, with the PC as a lovable loser rather than a villain.
Over time the product itself becomes the argument, with very few words. The iPod Silhouettes posters dropped copy, features and even faces, leaving the white earphones picked out against flat colour. Shot on iPhone ran ordinary users' photographs with only the line "Shot on iPhone 6", so the camera proved itself. Spike Jonze's Welcome Home made the sound of a HomePod into something you could watch, and R.I.P. Leon demonstrated unsending a text as a 30-second comic film, without a word of explanation.