Spoiler Alert: He didn’t write it.
If you are wondering why it is so familiar, it’s because it is on every poster, coaster and notebook cover out there. You’ve probably bought it for a friend with a start-up when you were looking for “motivational gifts” or You are that friend and were looking for inspiration.
Where it really began
Here’s The 1 minute 10 second video, voiced by Richard Dreyfuss, that marked the revolutionization of Apple and the return of Steve Jobs. The ‘Think Different’ campaign gave a new identity to Creators as the badass rebels and like the piece says – The ones who see things differently.
You would often find this quote in the “10 Best Steve Jobs Quotes” and that Steve Jobs was the mastermind to the campaign but with a little research you will encounter loads of pages crediting it to Rob Siltanen, who was then a Creative Director working at TBWA\Chiat\Day.
Hmm, This calls for a little investigative journalism *Insert cliché image of a magnifying glass* don’t you think?
Let’s look at the major players involved: TBWA employees – Lee Clow, Rob Siltanen, Craig Tanimoto and of course. Steve Jobs.
BBDO, the official ad agency at the time were focused on product-based advertising but what Apple needed was a strategy that would make people believe in them as a brand.
Multiple ad agencies were invited to pitch new ideas, Apple was back in business (Well… about 90 days until they would go bankrupt) and Steve Jobs who is known to be involved in every facet of the company was not about to let this pitch be an easy task.
Now, TBWA/Chiat/Day was already the biggest company of their time, they didn’t need to ‘pitch’ to win clients and Apple was going to be no different. Lee Clow, Chief Creative Officer of Chiat\Day and Rob Siltanen flew down to San Jose to meet with Jobs and Jobs meant business. Jobs knew the company was falling apart. He wanted to put out just some print ads in computer magazines and was not particularly keen on TV ads.
Jobs was talking to other agencies, Clow wanted the Apple account and this meant they would have to create a pitch, something he sternly disapproved. But this was about redemption for Clow who lost the Apple business to BBDO some 10 years ago.
After Clow and Siltanen’s first meeting with Jobs, TBWA went back to their office and realised their research on Apple didn’t paint a pretty picture- While big celebs were using the products, most people thought it was a dumb purchase and outright spoke about its diminishing market share. Apple needed a hail Mary and TBWA recognised this as an opportunity. They gathered all the talent they had to fastrack a pitch to Apple.
The next week was idea presentation time, they had put in four different creative teams on this Apple project and all floated in a pool of mediocrity until one idea screamed out at Siltanen and its creator was none other than (If you’ve been reading so far, the answer is already there. That’s right) Craig Tanimoto.
It was a simple black and white billboard campaign with three images. It perfectly contrasted the rainbow logo of Apple. It was exactly the kind of thought provoking content that Apple needed.
Tanimoto, who derived his work from Rene Magritte’s famous ‘This is not a pipe’, simply explained his work as ‘Think Different’ (To all the Grammar Nazis cringing away, stop. It’s the very point of the campaign.) It is often construed to be a reply to competitor, IBM’s Slogan “Think Business. Think IBM.”
This was the beginning, The idea gave rise to the creation of a mood-video with the hope that Jobs would want to run a TV campaign. It had snippets of famous people doing their thing, Seal’s song “Crazy,” with the key lyric, “We’re never going to survive unless we get a little crazy” and title cards that read :
“There are people who see the world differently.
They see things in new ways.
They invent, create, imagine.
We make tools for these kinds of people.
Because while some might see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.
(FADE TO APPLE LOGO AND TAGLINE)
Think different.”
They pitched it to Jobs. Jobs thought it would further reinforce the existing notion of his arrogance. The agency nearly gave up, when in true fairytale style, Jobs paused for a minute and went on to say
“What am I doing? Screw it. It’s the right thing. It’s great.”
But wait how did Siltanen’s longer version come into play?
Jobs came around on his previous decision of not doing TV ads and asked them to go ahead on it. Meanwhile, TBWA failed to get rights to Seal’s song, Jobs was not too happy about it and that is when Siltanen’s obsession with Dead Poets Society proved to be fruitful. He pitched the idea of writing something similar to Jobs, who like the rest of the world loved Robin Williams’ powerful performance and asked him to go ahead.
This is basically some sort of quote inception at this point.
Nobody could have prepared the agency for what was around the corner. Clow and Siltanen pitched their script and Steve Jobs told them off –
“It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency shit! I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society!’ This is crap!”
A rightfully pissed off Siltanen told Clow he was no longer going to be part of the Apple project and shifted focus to his other businesses. Clow put up the task to the copywriters in their company and one, Ken Segall who had worked with Jobs in the past tweaked the script slightly to its present form. He got it approved to be the final script for the commercial after Steve Jobs finally came around to it.
Guess Jobs does deserve the credit for ultimately deciding to go ahead with it.
All is well that ends well: Rob Siltanen now has his own firm – Siltanen & Partners, Ken Segall is a renowned writer and is also credited with naming the iMac and Apple went on to make history.
Well there we have it, the quote can be attributed to Rob Siltanen and Ken Segall.
But it does have a certain ring to it in the voice of the crazy one – Steve Jobs himself.