Think Different - Reception and Influence

Reception and Influence

Upon release, the "Think Different" Campaign proved to be an enormous success for Apple and TBWA\Chiat\Day. Critically acclaimed, the spot would garner numerous awards and accolades, including the 1998 Emmy Award for Best Commercial and the 2000 Grand Effie Award for most effective campaign in America. Envent the american rap group, the Wu Tang Clan named one of their album "Think Different" and the cover show the sign of the group colored like the apple logo.

In many ways, the new ad campaign would mark the beginning of Apple's re-emergence as a technical giant. In the years leading up to the ad, Apple had seen many of even its most staunch supporters switch over to other competitors in the market offering more sophisticated and better equipped processors. Even worse, the company had lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to the failure of Apple Newton, a billion-dollar project that proved to be critically, and commercially, unsuccessful. Appealing to the "counter-culture" image Apple had gained in its earlier years, the "Think Different" campaign, along with the return of Steve Jobs, put a bright spotlight on the company and consequently on many of the new products that were being announced, chief among them the immensely successful iMac personal computer and later the Mac OS X operating system.