Apple’s board hated the “1984” ad for the Macintosh
Suddenly, we see a young woman wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and running shorts. She carries a big hammer in her hands and we can see that she is being chased by helmeted police wearing face masks. The woman runs into a room full of men all watching some sort of propaganda on a huge screen. The woman spins to get momentum and then hurls the hammer into the screen which explodes into white light. And the words on the screen match what the voice-over announcer is saying: “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.”
The “1984” ad is not only the most famous Super Bowl ad, but some experts call it the best ad ever created
The ad agency and Jobs had to scramble to get the ad shown at all against the objections of Jobs’ own hand-picked CEO John Sculley. Apple’s board and Sculley wanted Apple to sell the Super Bowl airtime it purchased. Clow remembered that “We kind of conspired to not sell [the already purchased air time] so we could run it one time. We got a pretty big impact just running it once.”
As for Apple, the ad marked a short term peak as Sculley fired Steve Jobs in 1985 when sales of the Macintosh and the Lisa failed to gain traction. Jobs went on to run Pixar leading to its sale to Disney, and he also created a new firm called NeXT Computers. Apple bought NeXT in 1996 bringing Jobs back into the fold as an advisor. He soon worked his way back to CEO and launched a series of incredibly successful products including the translucent iMac G3, the G4, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad before succumbing to pancreatic cancer in 2011.
