Ridley Scott, sitting in the director’s chair of movies such as Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator, nearly 38 years after its release, announced his first reaction to the script of the 1984 Super Bowl commercial promoting Apple’s Macintosh computer, which is considered one of the most famous and influential commercials in the world.
When the Chiat/Day agency first offered Ridley Scott to direct the Apple ad, the famous director thought the agency was talking about the legendary band The Beatles. When the agency said the ad was about a company called Apple and a man named Steve Jobs, Scott’s reaction was “Who is Steve Jobs?” dead.
When Scott first saw the script, he thought it was devastatingly effective.
When he first read the script he was like, “Oh my god. They don’t say what it is, they don’t show what it is. They don’t even say what it’s good for,” Scott says, using art format advertising and devastatingly effective expressions for the screenplay.
The story of the ad is at least as famous as itself. The story goes that Steve Jobs and John Sculley liked the script so much that they bought an overpriced 90-second ad time to air during the Super Bowl without the rest of Apple’s board noticing.
The board rejected this idea and instructed the advertising agency Chiat/Day to sell the slot. Upon this, Steve Wozniak, who liked the ad very much, offered to pay half the cost of running the ad if Jobs paid the other half. However, this was no longer necessary as Chiat/Day sold 30 seconds of the slot and did not try to sell the remaining 60 seconds. This was the only time the ad was aired on national television, with millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity being provided to Apple, although it was subsequently rebroadcast on television news numerous times.
Here’s a 1984 Super Bowl commercial for the Macintosh by Ridley Scott
On the other hand, it was stated that the first trial results of the ad were terrible, and therefore the agency did not show these trials to Apple.
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