The Court of Justice of the European Union has dismissed Apple’s bid to overturn a decision by the EUIPO to revoke its “Think Different” trademark in the European Union. The company used the phrase for its marketing campaigns from 1997 to 2002.
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Apple has had a number of iconic ad campaigns over the years. Now, the mastermind behind many of them, Lee Clow, has announced his retirement. During his highly successful career over five decades, he spent 30-years in a partnership with Apple.
Apple is taking Swatch to court after the Swiss watchmaker used the slogan ‘Tick different’ to promote its NFC-enabled watch. Apple is arguing that the slogan unfairly trades on its own ‘Think different‘ campaign, while Swatch claims that the reference is purely coincidental.
‘Think different’ is arguably one of the most famous ad slogans in history, used by Apple from 1997 to 2002. It emerged from the one-minute ‘Crazy Ones’ commercial which featured a total of 17 people who changed the world by challenging the status quo …
It’s been a while since Apple used its ‘Think Different‘ slogan. Launched with a one-minute TV ad in 1997 when Apple was trying to persuade people to buy a Macintosh instead of an IBM PC, it hasn’t been used since 2002.
But Patently Apple notes that the company has expanded the European trademark filing to cover seven new product classes.
Apple’s International Classes for ‘Think Different’ have greatly expanded from one class to eight. The classes now cover Apple Watch (Horological and chronometric instruments; watches), Apple Pay (financial services); Apple Pencil, iPad, (computers, stylus), games, business management, subscription services, telecommunications, broadcasting, music, television, educational services and Siri (maintenance of proprietary computer software in the field of natural language, speech, speaker, language, voice recognition, and voice-print recognition) …
Apple fans are a dedicated bunch. Many of us diehards run out and buy every new gadget, making it nearly impossible for friends and family to come up with an original gift idea related to one of our biggest passions. My holiday gift guide includes items that you can’t buy from your local Apple store, but are sure to delight any fan of the company. These aren’t complementary products like a nice iPhone stand or Apple Watch band, but rather hard-to-find swag and collectibles that only real Apple fans would appreciate. Head below to take a look at my outside-the-box gift ideas for the Apple lover in your life:
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In a throwback to Apple’s Think Different campaign, the icon used by OS X for Swift files, Apple’s new programming language. Swift documents have the file extension ‘.swift’.
The code seen in the icon makes reference to the iconic speech, with functions named ‘heresToTheCrazyOnes’ and ‘villify(troubleMaker: NSObject)’. The code also generates collections of ‘misfits’, ‘rebels’ and ‘troublemakers’.
[youtube=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4NS2zdrZc”]
If you watched the movie Jobs, you may recall Steve recording the words to the “Here’s to the crazy ones” ad, looking at the camera and asking “Is that ok?”. The reality, says Ken Segall, the creative director behind Apple’s famous Think Different campaign, was rather different. Speaking in an interview with MacWorld, he said:
Imagine you’re in this lonely, empty auditorium, he’s just finished that reading, and the words are just ringing in the air, and then their was a great pause, and he said: ‘That’s it, I’m out of here. This is a horrible idea,’ and he stormed off.
While Jobs loved the words, he thought it was a terrible idea to narrate them personally – he thought everyone would think him an egomaniac and they wouldn’t hear the message. Segall says that things didn’t begin well.
He was late and he said ‘I’m really busy today I don’t have time for this, I don’t like the idea, but I’ll give you one read and then I’m out of here’. So he did it.
In the end, Jobs got his way: the ad that was actually aired was narrated by Richard Dreyfuss – but it was the Jobs version that went viral after the death of Apple’s co-founder.
Via Fortune
Ken Segall, the ad exec behind Apple’s Think Different campaign, and the man who put the i into iMac, has praised Apple’s new holiday ad, saying that it shows Apple is still thinking differently.
This ad is a holiday card from Cupertino. It lines up perfectly with the values Apple has communicated for years. It’s not about technology — it’s about quality of life.
The takeaway is much the same as one gets from the “Designed by Apple in California” ad, but I like it a hundred times more. In that previous effort, Apple simply told us why it is different. This new spot tells an interesting story and lets us draw that conclusion for ourselves. It’s a more artful, more memorable way to make the point.
Once again, Apple demonstrates it’s a different kind of technology company. Most talk about what goes into their phones — Apple shows what we can get out of them …
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS9sUm5Y0sg]
last year’s
The iPhone maker is many things to many people and it is easy to overlook Apple’s powerful marketing amidst the popularity of its gadgets. Yet, the two are inseparably intertwined. No wonder well-known names in business are (again) taking cues from Apple’s marketing cookbook, including United States specialty retailer of consumer electronics Best Buy that uncharacteristically decided to break away from the usual Super Bowl advertising featuring celebrities, which seems to be norm these days.
Instead, its new approach calls for celebrating technology innovators, a concept Apple popularized back in 1997 with the “Think Different” campaign. According to Bloomberg, the retailer opted to feature Silicon Valley inventors, such as Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom and camera phone pioneer Philippe Kahn who will help bring home the message at Sunday’s big game. From the mouth of Best Buy’s Marketing Chief Drew Panayiotou:
Big brands like to hire celebrities. We looked at everyone from George Clooney to Stephen Colbert. We believe the inventors are more than enough. I give those 125 million viewers a lot of credit. I think they’ll appreciate the story. […] They may not be at the same level as Steve Jobs, but they created some amazing stuff.
Eagle-eyed readers could point out that the retailer last holiday season aired Apple-focused adverts promoting its store-within-a-store displays, seen below. However, Best Buy’s latest creative concept marks a departure from its past Super Bowl campaigns that tapped celebrities, such as heavy metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne and teen heartthrob Justin Bieber. Meanwhile, a Taiwanese vendor is treading the fine line between originality and a display of disrespectfulness by featuring a Steve Jobs imitator to drum up excitement for its upcoming Android slab. Check it out that commercial in a clip included right after the break.
I had never heard this version until just now. It never aired.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rwsuXHA7RA]
Here’s to you, Steve. You were the Crazy One.
