Libor Kubín In the next sample from the book The Journey of Steve Jobs by Jay Elliot, you will learn what role advertising played in Apple.
1. DOOR OPENER
Branding
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in the great Silicon Valley tradition attributed to HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the tradition of two men in a garage.
Part of the history of Silicon Valley is that one day during that early garage period, Steve Jobs saw an Intel ad with pictures of things that everyone could relate to, things like hamburgers and chips. The absence of technical terms and symbols was striking. Steve was so intrigued by this approach that he decided to find out who the author of the ad was. He wanted this wizard to create the same miracle for the Apple brand because it was "still flying well under the radar."
Steve called Intel and asked who was in charge of their advertising and customer relations. He discovered that the mastermind behind the ad was a man named Regis McKenna. He called McKenna's secretary to make an appointment with him, but was turned down. However, he did not stop calling, calling up to four times a day. The secretary eventually asked her boss to agree to the meeting, and she finally got rid of Steve.
Steve and Woz showed up at McKenna's office to give their speech. McKenna gave them a polite hearing and told them he wasn't interested. Steve didn't move. He kept telling McKenna how great Apple was going to be—every inch as good as Intel. McKenna was too polite to allow himself to be fired, so Steve's persistence finally paid off. McKenna took on Apple as his client.
It's a good story. Although it is mentioned in many books, it did not actually happen.
Regis says he started working at a time when tech ads spouted the technical details of products. When he got Intel as a client, he managed to get their consent to produce ads that would be "colorful and fun". It was a stroke of luck to hire a "creative director from the consumer industry who couldn't tell the difference between microchips and potato chips" and thus produce eye-catching ads. But it wasn't always easy for Regis to convince clients to approve them. "It took a lot of hard convincing from Andy Grove and others at Intel."
That's the kind of creativity Steve Jobs was looking for. At the first meeting, Woz showed Regis a notepad as the basis for an ad. They were full of technical language and Woz was "reluctant to have someone transcribe them". Regis said he couldn't work for them.
At this stage, typical Steve showed up - he knew what he wanted and didn't give up. After the first refusal, he called and scheduled another meeting, this time without telling Woz about it. On their second meeting together, Regis had a different impression of Steve. Since then, he has spoken of him many times over the years: “I have often said that the only true visionaries I have met in Silicon Valley are Bob Noyce (of Intel) and Steve Jobs. Jobs has high praise for Woz as a technical genius, but it was Jobs who earned the trust of investors, consistently created Apple's vision, and steered the company toward its fulfillment.”
Steve took away from the second meeting a contract with Regis to accept Apple as a client. “Steve was and still is very persistent when it comes to achieving something. Sometimes it was difficult for me to leave a meeting with him,” says Regis.
(Side note: To shore up Apple's finances, Regis recommended that Steve talk to venture capitalist Don Valentine, then a founder and partner at Sequoia Capital. "Then Don called me," Regis recalls, "and asked, ' Why did you send me those renegades from the human race?'" However, Steve convinced him too. Although Valentine did not want to invest in the "renegades", he passed them on to Mike Markkul, who helped start Apple with his own investment, making him an equal partner of both Steves. Via investment banker Arthur Rock also provided them with the company's first major round of financing, and as we know, later became active as its chief executive.)
In my opinion, the episode about Steve seeking out Regis and then convincing him to take on Apple as a client has one more significant feature. It is the fact that Steve, still very young and much less experienced at the time than you, the reader, probably are, somehow understood the importance of the value of branding, building a brand. Growing up, Steve had no college or business degree and no manager or executive in the business world to learn from. Yet somehow he understood from the very beginning that Apple could only achieve great success if it became known as a brand.
Most people I have met have not yet grasped this important principle.
Steve and the art of branding
Choosing an advertising agency to work with Regis to present Apple as a brand, a name that would become a household name, was not a difficult task. Chiat/Day has been around since 1968 and has produced some very creative commercials that just about everyone has seen. Journalist Christy Marshall aptly characterized the agency in these words: “A place where success breeds arrogance, where enthusiasm borders on fanaticism and where intensity looks suspiciously like neurosis. It's also a bone in Madison Avenue's neck, mocking its inventive, often riveting ads as irresponsible and ineffective—and then copying them." (The agency that produced Apple's "1984" ad was again Chiat/Day, and the journalist's words suggest why Steve chose her.)
For anyone who ever needs clever, innovative advertising and has the guts to take an open approach, the journalist's words are an unusual but fascinating list of what to look for.
The man who invented "1984", advertising expert Lee Clow (now head of global advertising conglomerate TBWA), has his own views on nurturing and supporting creative people. He says they are “50 percent ego and 50 percent insecurity. They have to be told all the time that they are good and loved”.
Once Steve finds a person or company that meets his exacting requirements, he becomes reliably loyal to them. Lee Clow explains that it's common for large companies to suddenly change ad agencies, even after years of hugely successful campaigns. But Steve says the situation was quite different at Apple. It was "a very personal matter from the very beginning". Apple's attitude has always been: “If we're successful, you're successful... If we do well, you'll do well. You will only lose the profit if we go bankrupt.''
Steve Jobs' approach to designers and creative teams, as Clow described it, was one of loyalty from the beginning and then for years. Clow calls this loyalty "a way to be respected for your ideas and contribution."
Steve demonstrated his sense of loyalty described by Clow in relation to the Chiat/Day firm. When he left Apple to found NeXT, Apple management quickly rejected said advertising agency that Steve had previously selected. When Steve returned to Apple after ten years, one of his first actions was to re-engage Chiat/Day. The names and faces have changed over the years, but the creativity remains, and Steve still has a loyal respect for the ideas and contributions of employees.
Public face
Few people have ever managed to become the familiar face of a woman or man from magazine covers, newspaper articles and television stories. Of course, most people who have succeeded are politicians, athletes, actors or musicians. No one in the business would expect to become the kind of celebrity that happened to Steve without trying.
As Apple prospered, Jay Chiat, head of Chiat/Day, helped a process that was already running on its own. He supported Steve as the "face" of Apple and its products, much like Lee Iacocca had become during the changes at Chrysler. From the early days of the company, Steve—brilliant, complex, controversial Steve—was faces Apple.
In the early days, when the Mac wasn't selling so well, I told Steve that the company should do commercials with him on camera, as Lee Iacocca had successfully done for Chrysler. After all, Steve appeared on the front pages so many times that people recognized him more easily than Lee in early Chrysler commercials. Steve was enthusiastic about the idea, but the Apple executives who decided on the ad assignment did not agree.
It is clear that the first Mac computers had weaknesses, so common to most products. (Just think of the first generation of almost everything from Microsoft.) However, the ease of use was slightly overshadowed by the Mac's limited memory and black-and-white monitor. A significant number of loyal Apple fans and creative types in the entertainment, advertising and design business gave the device an effective sales boost from the very beginning. The Mac then unleashed the whole desktop publishing phenomenon among amateurs as well as professionals.
The fact that the Mac carried the "Made in the USA" label also helped. A Mac assembly plant in Fremont sprung up where a General Motors plant — once the area's economic mainstay — was about to close. Apple became a local and national hero.
The Macintosh and Mac brand, of course, created a whole new Apple. But after Steve's departure, Apple lost some of its luster as it fell in line with other computer companies, selling through traditional sales channels like all competitors and measuring market share instead of product innovation. The only good news was that loyal Macintosh customers did not lose their relationship with it even during this difficult period.
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Sorry Libor, but you look like some kind of murderer in that photo :D
I know they say don't judge a book by its cover and I don't want to diminish the work of the publisher and other people. But I can't forgive myself. It's a book about Steve Jobs and the cover might reflect that. The cover of the book is downright hideous.
Totally agree…..Steve Jobs back in the early days of Apple Computer Inc. learned from his mentor Mike Markkula that a book is sold and judged by its cover. Steve brought this idea to perfection, or even to obsession….that is why today we have perfect products in unique and high-end packaging, which give us a feeling of exceptionality and uniqueness when unboxing.
The cover of this book is a complete degradation of the personality and mindset of Steve Jobs. A person who had an incredible feeling for fine and perfect design, who cared about every possible detail.
The book would certainly deserve a better rendering of the cover considering the personality that is the central character of this book.
To: m. + Maros Kadlec:
You may or may not like the cover. I personally don't have a big problem with her. I don't know what led the Czech publisher to create his own design, but speaking of criticism... Have you seen the original cover? So go to her Look...
it: Libor http://thestevejobsway.com/ I look and it's also a hit parade :-)