Why Apple's iconic Super Bowl ad still resonates 4 decades later

Yahoo ^ | February 10, 2024 | Dylan Croll

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Super Bowl 2024: The big business behind the big gameScroll back up to restore default view. Dylan Croll Dylan Croll·Markets Reporter Sat, February 10, 2024 at 10:10 AM EST·7 min read In this article:

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Once upon a time, believe it or not, no one particularly looked forward to Super Bowl ads.

That all changed when Washington faced Los Angeles on Jan. 22, 1984, in Tampa, Fla. Those who tuned in to the big game on CBS — and hadn’t fled to the kitchen for snacks — may have been intrigued by something completely different.

In between ads for Gillette Foamy Gel and Northwestern Mutual insurance, a dystopian scene appeared on their TV sets: A line of men wearing faded gray apparel marched mindlessly into a theater, where a bespectacled face, “Big Brother,” addressed them on a massive screen.

[Don W]

It took less than 10 seconds:

Anya Major

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Big Brother was actually Apple. IBM let Microsoft sell their software to any other computer manufacturer. Microsoft had a more open operating system and let anyone write apps for it while Apple kept development in house.

Apple lost out to Microsoft and struggled for some time. Microsoft started struggling when they tried to monopolize the browser, i.e. when they started acting like the Big Brother that Apple was.

[exnavy]

That was intentional.

[x]

The very thing their ad says they were fighting they helped create. Irony.

Too true. Those megacomputers didn't go away. They are keeping better track of us than ever because of our home and work computers and our phones. Not to mention the role Apple has played in building up the Chinese dictatorship.

[x]

And yet, everybody who saw the ad remembers the ad, as do a lot of people who weren’t even born when it was made. It gave Apple a corporate image and it moved product out the door. While some ads were pointless, this one wasn’t.

[Lazamataz]

It resonates but in all the wrong ways. It birthed the whole “let’s spend a whole bunch of money making an iconic micro-movie that actually doesn’t tell anybody anything about the product, and in fact barely even names it, cause Super Bowl.”

Yet, in the end and due to media coverage, everyone knew Apple was the source and the product being advertised. At the end of the day, I call that an advertising win.

[discostu]

Well do we remember it or are we reminded of it every single year as part of the lead up to the SB? Sure it was a sea changing ad, but was it actually a good ad? Did it actually sell computers? And would anybody care about it if we didn’t have the annual “SB commercials history” article? How many of the ads that have tried to follow that path does anybody remember? How many of them actually caused sales of what they were advertising?

[daniel1212]

` IBM as Big Brother was the wrong target. It should have been Bill Gates. For me, the best Super Bowl ad evah.

But what can you run on a Apple? What free software but theirs?

[FLT-bird]

I remember everybody panning that ad as being pretentious and not really directed at selling Apple computers - which truthfully, it didn’t.

[markman46]

nobody ever lost their job buying IBM
IBM screwup their OS/2 OS didnt sell it well. but it’s still alive..