The Most Successful TV Ad in History, and Why
By January 1984, Apple stock had dropped from it's December 1980 IPO price of $22 a share down to $0.12 per share. Internal strife, product missteps, and strong competition were sullying the brand, while high profit margins and lack of consistent innovation were impeding both sales and Apple's #corporatestorytelling. If you'd bought 1000 shares that month for $120 and held it, the value today would be $1.59M. Not many brands tell a 159,000% increase story. So what changed for Apple, and when?
Apple’s turning point is easily trackable to a single 60-second ad that aired one time and one time only during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII between the Los Angeles Raiders and Washington Redskins. The Raiders won that title, but the big winner was the little startup that had gone public just three years earlier. How Apple caught lightning in a bottle is impressive – it's also something any of us can do in our own presentations.
Disruption and shock
Apple's Super Bowl ad was titled 1984, a nod to George Orwell's dystopian future, symbolizing their mission to disrupt IBM’s dominance in a personal computing market still very much up for grabs. In 1983, most businesses and governments still employed large, expensive, technically complex mainframes. And while the first PCs were smaller and less intimidating, they still featured basic black screens and boring green text-based commands.
Apple was ready to destroy the status quo in one fatal blow. They hired LA ad firm, Chiat/Day, to launch their new Macintosh platform, and brought in Ridley Scott (just off big sci-fi hits like Alien and Blade Runner) to direct. The goal was impressive: Change minds and spark creativity through unavoidable disruption and uncomfortable shock.
Shot in one week on a $500,000 budget, a lone heroine (played by Anya Major, a British discus thrower) wielding a sledgehammer runs through a blue-gray (IBM) wasteland past two hundred extras with shaved heads, all marching in lock-step, mindlessly transfixed by Big Brother’s fascist rants. She bounds up a staircase, then hurls the hammer through a giant screen filled by the contorted fury of an authoritarian leader. Her surprising, powerful action shatters norms and frees automatons everywhere from their prison of technologic conformity.
Audiences were stunned. And confused. They were also leaning in and amped up. 1984 was more than just a TV commercial; it was a banshee-level liberation battle cry.
Logic and Emotion
Apple's anti-establishment Super Bowl gamble broke every advertising rule of the day. No data. No pitch. Not one number, statistic, or proof point. Not even a single image of the Macintosh computer. Just a bold, fearless narrative that instantly made the Apple brand synonymous with empowerment, creativity, and rebellion. Something every viewer craved even if they didn't know they craved it.
When was the last time you heard a sales pitch or listened to a speaker move the needle without even talking about their product and its superior benefits? 41 years on, 1984 remains the most successful and effective marketing message in history. It's a masterful example of emotional and logical appeals combined with rhetorical devices to create memorable, actionable outcomes.
For emotion, Scott used dramatic visuals and music to create a sense of urgency and insurgency, rallying an American society who viewed freedom as an ideal, but also felt much of that freedom was politically restricted. Sound familiar today? The ad's logic emphasized Apple as the technology tool any of us could use to break out of blind conformity and into a world of personal control over the evil establishment. Before 1984, that control was solely in the hands of rich and powerful corporations; thanks to Apple, it was now our domain. The power to be and do whoever and whatever we wanted without barriers or billions.
Intent Leads Content
Let's bring this down to a mere mortal level. Most of us can't stand on a stage or in front of our team and promise to change the known world as Apple did in 1984. Our roles are more limited, our messages more about altering the moment than altering the future of mankind.
But intent leads content. Getting our audience to step out of their accepted comfort zones into a brave new empowered reality requires the same appeals to logic and emotion deployed by Chiat/Day. One without the other won't work.
When we speak with nothing but logic, all we do is brag about quality and beg for customers to buy. When we suppress emotion or lack passion in our story, the message fails to hit its mark. Our audience needs to learn from us and invest in us simultaneously in order to engage, retain, and react.
Start by assessing your brand message to the marketplace and how management communicates with employees. Is the logic built solely on numbers, data, and typical sales tactics? Go stream 1984 and learn its lessons: add challenge, raise the stakes, increase the sense of empowerment you offer – your sledgehammer to the status quo.
Analyze your talk for its ability to elicit emotion. Does your content generate excitement, deliver the drama, and create deep personal meaning for the intended audience? If not, watch 1984 again and notice where you lean in, why you connect with its #corporatestorytelling, and how you feel as Major ascends those stairs and smashes the unsatisfying norms to reveal tomorrow's awesome potential.
Bottom Line
When shown the finished ad in late 1983, Apple’s board members hated it. CEO, John Sculley, instructed Chiat/Day to sell back both the 30- and 60-second time slots they’d purchased from CBS for $1 million. But they were only able to unload the 30-second slot. Faced with eating the $500K production costs of an ad that could only successfully air during calendar year 1984, Apple swallowed hard and let the ad run. Once.
43 million Americans were mesmerized. CBS announcers Pat Summerall and John Madden asked, “Wow, what was that?” 1984 won the Grand Prize at the Cannes International Advertising Festival and Advertising Age’s 1980s Commercial of the Decade. Then Steve Jobs plugged in his creation at a launch event, flipped a switch, and it spoke to us: “Hello, I am Macintosh.”
Television's most successful ad omitted the product, the KPIs, and the pitch to link brand identity with buyer identity for a 159,000% ROI in a highly competitive landscape. We can follow that same strategy. Each of us faces strong competition in our own markets, what we sell and how to command limited attention in our sensory-overloaded society. We win that competition when we prioritize emotion and logic with human psychology instead of average, uninspired product-centric corporate speak.
With every engagement, every meeting, every customer visit, take a page from Apple: Hit the audience where they live, without fear, challenge them, build the stakes, empower their desires and eliminate their apprehensions. Make your message bigger, badder, bolder so it smashes through walls and creates lasting memories.
