Super Bowl LIX is the upcoming American football championship game of the National Football League (NFL) for the 2024 season. The game is scheduled for 9 February 2025, at Caesar's Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana.
A rematch of Super Bowl LVII two years prior, the game will be played between American Football Conference (AFC) champion and two-time defending Super Bowl champion, the Kansas City Chiefs and National Football Conference (NFC) champion, the Philadelphia Eagles.
It was during Superbowl XXVIII in 1984 that Apple released an ad that woould change the way people thought abut ads during the Superbowl. It wasn’t because of anything that happened in the game itself: On 22 January 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated Washington 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII, a contest that was mostly over before half-time.
During the broadcast on CBS, a 60-second commercial loosely inspired by a famous George Orwell novel shook up the advertising and the technology sectors without ever showing the product it promoted. Conceived by the Chiat/Day ad agency and directed by Ridley Scott, then fresh off making the seminal science-fiction noir, Blade Runner, the Apple commercial, "1984," which was intended to introduce the new Macintosh computer, would become one of the most acclaimed commercials ever made.
It also helped to kick off, pun partially intended, the Super Bowl tradition of the big game serving as an annual showcase for gilt-edged ads from Fortune 500 companies. It all began with the Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs’s desire to take the battle with the company’s rivals to a splashy television broadcast he knew nothing about.
In recent interviews, several of the people involved in creating the, "1984" spot - Scott; John Sculley, then-chief executive of Apple; Steve Hayden, a writer of the ad for Chiat/Day; Fred Goldberg, the Apple account manager for Chiat/Day and Anya Rajah, the actor who famously threw the sledgehammer - looked back on how the commercial came together, its inspiration and the internal objections that almost kept it from airing. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
Sculley: "on 19 October 1983, we’re all sitting around in Steve [Jobs’s] building, the Mac building, and the cover of Businessweek says, "The Winner is … IBM." We were pretty deflated because this was the introduction of the IBM PCjr, and we hadn’t even introduced the Macintosh yet."
Hayden: "Jobs said, "I want something that will stop the world in its tracks." Our media director, Hank Antosz, said, "Well, there’s only one place that can do that - the Super Bowl." And Steve Jobs said, "What’s the Super Bowl?" [Antosz] said, "Well, it’s a huge football game that attracts one of the largest audiences of the year." And [Jobs] said, "I’ve never seen a Super Bowl. I don’t think I know anybody who’s seen a Super Bowl.""
Goldberg: "The original idea was actually done in 1982. We presented an ad [with] a headline, which was, "Why 1984 Won’t Be Like '1984,'" to Steve Jobs, and he didn’t think the Apple III was worthy of that claim.
Sculley: "They said, "A lot of people might want to do something with George Orwell’s, '1984'. If we can take advantage of the fact that we’re introducing the Macintosh in January, maybe it can be so spectacular in our ads that no one else will even think about trying to copy us."
Hayden: "We started imagining, well, what did we think 1984 was going to be like, based on Orwell's writing? And we thought it would be not so dissimilar from the world we were in at the time. Russia had invaded Afghanistan. It was impossible for the Russian people to get any kind of accurate information from their own news services about what was going on."
Goldberg: "It was Lee Clow, who was the creative director of Chiat/Day at that time, who oversaw the creation of the commercial that came out of that print concept."
Hayden: "Given the sunny good nature of the average person, wouldn’t this be a great tool to rebel against government overreach, especially in parts of the world where news is suppressed, manipulated or so tightly controlled it was useless to people?"
Ridley Scott: "I said, “A computer for what reason? To write the shopping list? What’s the matter with a pencil and paper?” They laughed. How wrong I was. I should have bought stock then."
Hayden: "At the time, Ridley was dealing with a lot of these issues about the meaning of the future, and how technologies could be twisted for good or for evil, because he was working on, Blade Runner."
Scott: "I was amazed that the agency was so brave to take a highbrow piece of literature to sell a box that they never talked about, never showed a picture, never said what it was for."
Hayden: "We had originally envisioned this as a comical situation of drone-like people being hectored by a loudspeaker, told where to go, what to do, what room the meeting was in, and so forth. [Scott] pulled out a beautiful book of the movie, Metropolis, so his inspiration, combined with our original storyboard of people being controlled by forces beyond their understanding, really helped us refocus the idea into technology as a tool for freedom."
Scott: "I needed a man who is an extreme right-wing dictator. I want him on the screen doing his rant as an objector makes their way along the corridors of power being chased by the police."
Rajah: "All we knew was that they wanted to see us throw discus. I used to be a javelin and discus thrower at school, so I went along. I was pretty good, and I obviously looked the part."
Scott: "I tend to, in my career, have very strong, powerful women. I looked for an athlete rather than a model."
Rajah: "Ridley gave me an image of the hairstyle and colour that he wanted on me, and sent me off to Vidal Sassoon in London to have it cut and coloured. Even though I already had short blonde hair, he wanted it shorter and almost white-blonde. He was right - it was perfect for the part!"
Scott: "Some people thought it was a million-dollar project. It wasn’t. I was very frugal. I tend to be on budget."
Hayden: "He found a junked Vulcan bomber and had parts of that mounted on the walls and all around."
Goldberg: "[The budget] was four commercials for $650 000. I figure that commercial was $350 000, maybe $400 000."
Scott: "I couldn’t afford the cast that I wanted, so I employed a whole bunch of National Front —extreme rightists who all had their heads shaved and tend not to have a job. I had 200 National Front in the studio. I think they were grateful for the work and had breakfast, lunch and dinner, and they got paid a bit."
Goldberg: "We paid them a total of $10 000 to sit there for three days having smoke blown in their face. They were really getting out of control at the end. The studio and the production house had security brought in. They had German shepherds to control these guys because they were throwing rocks at each other."
Rajah: "I had to have a bodyguard because they were all real skinheads."
Scott: "I shot [the dictator] the day before on 16-millimeter, had it developed overnight, and then we projected it large on the screen, so it photographed badly, in a good way. I wanted it to look very deteriorated."
Hayden: "The dictator’s speech didn’t exist in the original script of the commercial. Ridley Scott called me and said, "It would be very useful if you could write 30 or 60 seconds' worth of copy." I went out with my brother, who was actually teaching in China as a law professor. Between the two of us, we came up with little snippets of quotes from Mussolini, from Mao, from the People’s Daily, from Goebbels, and from Hitler himself."
Scott: "Trying to explain to that lot what I was doing was quite difficult, so I said, “Just do as you’re told. There’s going to be a moment when this athlete flings a hammer at the screen. The screen will explode. I want you all to go, ‘ahhhh.’” And they did.
"I thought it was pretty good," Scott said of the ad. "But I was thinking, 'Really? They’re going to run this on the Super Bowl?'"
Rajah: "Throwing a real hammer was not going to be wise, so they ended up making a papier-mâché one, which I had to work with. It doesn’t look like papier-mâché, so it worked out OK.
Goldberg: "It was a terrific piece of film. Everybody at the agency loved it."
Hayden: "Steve Jobs was excited but frightened by it. Steve Wozniak offered to pay to run the commercial himself."
Sculley: "Before the commercial ran, we had to take it to the board of directors. The board sees the commercial, and then there’s just dead silence in the boardroom. They turn and look at me, and [a board member] says, “You’re not really going to run that thing, are you?"
Hayden: "As the closing credits scrolled up, the chairman, Mike Markkula, put his head in his hands and kind of folded over the conference table, and then slowly straightened up and [proposed hiring a different ad agency]."
Scott: "I made it. I thought it was pretty good. But I was thinking, "Really? They’re going to run this on the Super Bowl? And we don’t know what it’s for?"
Goldberg: "I had them do a theater test. We get back the results, and it’s the worst business commercial that they’ve ever tested, in terms of persuasiveness."
Sculley: "The board said, "We don’t think you should run it. Try to sell the time."
Goldberg: "And it was Jay Chiat who told us to drag our feet, basically, when we were told to sell off the time on the Super Bowl."
Hayden: "At long last, it came down that we would run the, "1984" commercial once."
Goldberg: "Every news show had clips of it. The commercial kept running and running and running for days after that."
Sculley: "It ran for free, over and over again."
Goldberg: "The value of the offshoot publicity is what many advertisers see as the bigger benefit."
Scott: "I think the Super Bowl frenzy started there. Then, it was about $1 million a minute. Now, it’s about $7 million a minute. [The average cost for a Super Bowl ad this year is actually twice that: $7 million for a 30-second spot.]"
Sculley: "When you’re doing something that’s never been done before, and it has a chance to change people’s lives in terms of how they work and play and communicate, doing something that seems outlandish is a pretty good idea - if you do it right."
When viewed now, it's the epitome of the 1980's – CRT TVs, dramatic voiceovers and big hair. However, back then, it was unlike any commercial America had ever seen.
"They sold $150 million worth of computers in 100 days," says David Stubley – sports marketing expert and author of Gamechangers and Rainmakers: How Sport Became Big Business – in an interview. "The whole ad industry just stopped in their tracks and went: 'What just happened? How did that happen?'"
It might be hard to believe, but the Super Bowl was not always such a big deal. Long before Taylor Swift or the invention of the jumbotron, Super Bowl I was won, fairly comfortably, by the 1967 Green Bay Packers.
If you were one of the 24 million people watching at home, you would have seen halftime commercials from the likes of Goodyear, McDonald’s and Tang, each of whom would have paid a reported $38 000 for the slot – about $350 000 when adjusted for inflation.
By 1984, Stubley estimates that companies were forking out around $300 000 or $900 000 adjusted. That’s a sizeable amount, until you consider that the NFL is now selling some 30-second slots for $8 million.
It would be disingenuous to claim that, "1984" is the sole reason for Super Bowl commercials now releasing with the fanfare that they do. But, as Stubley explains, there is a noticeable “before and after” effect around the iconic commercial.
"Advertising before that time was either cheesy, personality driven, or what I would describe as transactional – 'Here it is, do you want it?'" he explains. "What this ad did, it basically said: 'Forget everything that’s happened in the past. And the only way to do that is to smash that hammer through that big screen.'"
It's perhaps no surprise that the commercial was so cinematic, given who directed it. Ridley Scott had enjoyed so much success with, Alien and Blade Runner by that point that many did not realise the Englishman had actually started his career in the advertising industry.
His signature dystopian style lent itself perfectly to Orwell's story.
"We were all so scared about 1984, so it tapped into that brilliantly," says Stubley. "Everyone thought the world was going to come to an end in 1984, if you’d read George Orwell's book. And so to have this take on that whole scariness and confront it in such a brilliant way, I think it really caught people’s imagination."
Despite the Macintosh computer never actually featuring in the commercial itself, it is hard not hard to infer that, "Big Brother" represented the existing tech companies.
"The juxtaposition between the alternative of IBM and HP and Dell and this was probably what made it so exciting for everybody. It’s a bit like the Air Jordans 10 years later. You know, sticking two fingers up to the establishment," explains Stubley.
The success of the Macintosh commercial, according to Stubley, prompted other companies to spend bigger on their own Super Bowl advertising.
"Post-1984 there was a lot of money to go around," he says. “And so if you want to build rapid brand awareness (and) you’ve got a $400 million ad budget, as Budweiser would have had in the 90's, and you want to put Miller Light back in its box … you just buy up the ad breaks in the Super Bowl."
When Steve Jobs first saw the ad in an internal meeting with Chiat/Day, his first reaction was, "Oh s–t. This is amazing," then-Apple CEO, John Sculley, told Business Insider. Steve Wozniak shared the same opinion, calling it, "better than any science fiction trailer." Apple’s Board of Directors, however, had very different thoughts.
After seeing it for the first time, board member, Mike Markkula, suggested finding a new marketing agency and firing Chiat/Day. According to Sculley, other members of the board had similar opinions. "The others just looked at each other, dazed expressions on their faces … Most of them felt it was the worst commercial they had ever seen. Not a single outside board member liked it."
After getting, "cold feet," Sculley instructed Chiat\Day principal, Jay Chiat, to sell off the Super Bowl airtime they had purchased, but Chiat quietly disobeyed. At the time, they had two slots – a 60-second ad to play during the third quarter and a 30-second shorter version for later during the game. Chiat sold only the 30-second and told Sculley it was too late to sell the more extended 60-second spot when they did not even try.
When Jobs told Woz the ad was in trouble, he immediately offered to pay $400 000 out of pocket — half of what the airtime cost for the ad would have been. Saying, "Well, I’ll pay half if you will."
This turned out to be unnecessary. The executive team finally decided to run a 100-day Macintosh advertising blitz. Since they had already paid to produce, '1984' and were stuck with the airtime, the Super Bowl ad went ahead to kick off the campaign.
By doing the opposite of Sculley’s instructions, Chiat helped play a significant role in Macintosh’s success and cementing the company’s place in history. Apple continued to use Chiat/Day for TV advertising until 2014.
I never thought that a single ad can lead to such a revolution. I suppose then that it's no surprise that it was Apple that started it. They are known for revolutionising aspects of life. Things like these need to happen in order for humanity to proceed further into existence. We would probably be stuck in the stone age if such events didn't take place.