90's Seminar - Think Different

In our lecture on 08/03/17 on the context of the 90's, we looked at the context surrounding some of the iconic 90's ads, including Apple's 'Think Different' campaign from 1997. In the mid 90's, Apple's brand value was severely declining, and the brand was seen as uncool and undesirable. Apple's advertising agencies TBWA and Chiat/Day had a mammoth task in rebuilding brand identity, and tried to enforce notions of counter-culture change and innovation. The adverts they created took famous figures and icons from politics, religion, sport, dance, art and generally every discipline known. The adverts were so successful that they won an Emmy Award for Best Commercial. The ads completely changed Apple's brand identity, and the brand is now synonymous with being 'cool', and incredibly popular.

Creative Revolution in Images

The 1970's

Brief Notes from presentation:

• Punk Subculture - goes against the mainstream - reflected attitude of youth movement.Judith Williamson - Decoding Advertising 
• Marxism became popular 
• Barthes revealed that there was ideology in advertisements 
• Post modernist architecture 
• ’72 City Sculpture Projects 
• Unemployment up 
• Union Strikes 
• ‘Protest era’ - low wages, inflation 
• Ron Collings 
• Blog the sculpture trip 
• LINK ESSAY TO BRIEF 
• Add social / political / current climate context to R&D book

Iconic 70's Adverts & Context Images:

Apple Music & Music Streaming

With the introduction of Web 2.0 in the 00’s, websites started to realise that they could become more of a service to consumers, and thus came e-commerce businesses. Christina Spurgeon wrote in her book ‘Advertising And New Media’, ’where web 1.0 firms view the internet as a platform for publishing and selling, Web 2.0 firms, such as Amazon and Google, use it as a services interface.’ she also added that ‘they understand the primary importance of developing web services to facilitate advertiser and consumer participation and interaction.’ There has been a massive increase in online services in the last decade, with services such as Netflix etc. Music streaming has become a massive industry also, with sites like Spotify and Tidal becoming increasingly popular. Apple have their own music streaming service, Apple Music, which allows users to access all music they could think of for a monthly subscription fee. Apple have created a lot of brilliant advertising for their music streaming service, in order to place them in front of other competitors. They created an ad campaign with Taylor Swift in 2015, where she was on treadmill singing badly to a Drake song. The Advert was viewed over 20 million times on YouTube (Taylor vs Treadmill, uploaded by Beats1 Radio) and caused Drake to be sent to number one in the charts. In 2017, history repeated itself when Drake did and advert with Apple Music listening to a Taylor Swift song. The two adverts show Apple’s satirical humour and the fact that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but that they’re big enough to get extremely current and famous musicians to be in their adverts. They also ran a series of adverts showcasing some of the musicians that they have available to listen to, they created cinematic black and white adverts of people like James Bay, playing the piano and singing his song exclusively for the ad. This showcase of the music showed that Apple was serious about the service they provide, and the quality of what they had to offer.

Apple - 1984

When Bill Bernbach brought forward the idea of a creative team working together to create advertising campaigns, he bought about a creative revolution that shaped the way agencies thought and produced. One agency that took this forward was Chiat-Day (TBWA), where Steve Hayden (Copywriter) and Lee Clow (Art Director) worked together to create ‘1984’, a groundbreaking campaign for Apple’s Macintosh. The ad ran in a superbowl commercial slot, and was only aired on television twice yet received 7 awards including a Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival award. The adverts success was phenomenal and it led to superbowl adverts being wildly anticipated in later years, it set a high standard for advertising to become more creative, cinematic and provocative. It also led to decades of unprecedented adverts from Apple, who have become synonymous with cutting edge advertising that is slick, modern and always in touch which technological change.

Advertising & New Media - Lecture

• late 80’s - reproduction of paintings used in advertising 
• New media is characterised by engagement 
• It works ‘not through persuasion or impressions but through engagement and involvement’ - Oglivy 
• High Feeling Strategy - audience is involved in ad making: feature and distribution 
• Adweek admired the click bait title of Ronaldo ad for headphones - ROC Live Life Loud 
• ROC part owned by Ronaldo & Shareability 
• Share ability creates social content ‘A content factory that blows stuff up’ 
• Ronaldo ad - Most shared celebrity video in the world 2015 + most shared ad of the month 
• Fastest brand video to reach 30M views in the history of the internet (24.5 hours) 
• Ad of the decade 
• National Media Museum 
• ‘mobile phones will soon become the greatest tool for persuasion, more so than any other medium for advertising’ - Fogg 
• Kairos Factor 
• Software Takes Command - Manovich 2013 
• Advertising & New Media - Christina Spurgeon - Old & New Communication models 
• Alan Kay - Created expandable (new) media - Conceived DynaBook concept: basics for laptops & tablets 
• New media was for learning, discovery and artistic creation 
• Applications were to simulate old media altogether in a computer 
• New media is a wide range of already existing and yet to be made media 
• ‘new media allows us to think in exciting new ways about advertising, as an industry and as a communication process’ 
• User Generated Content - USG generated $10m to Mentos - Coke Mentos 
• ‘Viral is unpaid P2P communication of provocative content originating from an identified sponsor using the internet to persuade or influence an audience to pass along the content to others - Southgate et al (2010 
• Andy Fowler - Brothers & Sisters : New media brought the golden age

Sony Bravia - 'Balls'

From looking at music in advertising for my essay, I decided to look at iconic adverts which had a big focus on the soundtrack used. The Sony Bravia 'Balls' advert took 3 years to create, and is one of the most highly celebrated pieces of modern advertising. The music used for the advert was Jose Gonzalez's 'Heartbeats' - and after the agency had heard the song and seen the footage from the shoot, they decided to make the advert last the full length of the song, due to the extensive amount of beautiful shots produced and the beauty of the song mixed together. The song gained huge success from the advert, and has been consequently been streamed over 160 million times on Spotify. Not only did the song have huge success, but the advert went viral even before it was edited or finished. Due to the advert being filmed on location in San Fransisco, passers by were taking pictures and videos and sharing them online for the whole world to see. From this mass of UGC, the advert was already famous in pre production, something that was unheard of at the time. As well as being a beautiful advert, 'Balls' was hardly edited in post production. Sinnock, the planner for the advert from Fallon London (the agency behind the ad) said "I don’t think even we knew exactly what the end result was going to feel like, but I remember seeing the cut as it was, straight off the rushes, and that was virtually as it went on air. Nothing was tampered with, which is quite impressive."
Source used: https://www.dandad.org/en/d-ad-sony-balls-case-study-insights/

A Soundtrack To Apple

In the Creative Review Music Issue of January 2017, there was an article called 'A Soundtrack To Apple' - including an interview with Chris Pattinson, the music director at TBWA (Apple's advertising agency). The interview and article discusses how music is an integral part of Apple's advertising identity, and also how Apple have helped to change the way that music is viewed in adverts globally. Musicians used to be seen as selling out if their music was used in an advert, but in modern times advertising can be seen as a way for people to explore and find new music that they otherwise wouldn't have heard. Apple's silhouette adverts were a huge success in making iTunes and the iPod a widely bought product, and they were revolutionary in terms of art direction with bright colours and by using a green screen and most production to create moving silhouettes. I have used this as a resource within my essay.