In the late 1990s, Apple was the opposite of invincible. It had too many products, too little focus and a stock price that had collapsed. Then the company put a big emotional idea on screen and called it Think Different.
The hook and when it ran
The campaign launched in the fall of 1997, just months after Steve Jobs returned to a company many had written off. Instead of speed, memory or price, the ad sold a worldview: creative outsiders, not the status quo, drive progress.
The film itself is a minute of black-and-white archival portraits, held together by a sparse voiceover and the tagline. It never shows a product.
How the film was built
TBWA\Chiat\Day built the campaign under Lee Clow. The agency avoided a hard sell. It paired archival portraits with a restrained voice performance from Richard Dreyfuss, then let the Apple logo appear without a single computer on screen. That restraint made it feel like a statement, not a commercial.
The print work took the same idea further: one face, one line, an Apple logo and the words Think Different.
Why it spread in its day
It was unlike every other PC ad. While competitors shouted processor speeds, Apple talked about changing the world, not clock cycles. That contrast made it instantly quotable and debatable. Grammar purists objected to “Think Different” instead of “Think Differently,” which kept the tagline in conversation.
It also gave Apple buyers a story to tell themselves. Owning a Mac became a form of identification, not a purchase.
What it did for the brand
The campaign gave Apple a coherent identity when it badly needed one. Within a year, the company returned to profitability, and the Think Different platform carried Apple into the iMac launch that followed. More importantly, it repositioned the brand from a struggling computer maker to a home for creative ambition.
The line remained in use into the early 2000s and became shorthand for emotional brand building in tech.
Steal this: three moves that still work
- Lead with belief, not features. If the product cannot win on specs yet, sell the worldview your best users already share.
- Make the rule-break part of the story. A deliberately ungrammatical tagline can become free media and brand memory.
- Repeat one visual system. One face, one line, one logo. The consistency did the heavy lifting.
Think Different endures because it made Apple’s constraint—no product worth showing—into its creative advantage.
Watch the original: Apple on YouTube
