Transcript:
Advertising was actually sort of a second choice for me the really odd part of my story is that when I went to college when I just graduated high school and I was only 18 years old I took a test that was to determine you know where my interests were who what professions I matched up with and advertising amazingly enough was the number one thing but I didn’t take advertising classes I went to college and I played the drums and rock bands and it wasn’t till after seven years after college that I decided to hang up my drumsticks and get into advertising so it was quite amazing that I ended up in the place where that test told me I should end up when I was 18 years old I wasted about 12 years in the meantime but so that’s how I got there basically and I took a job in an ad agency not even knowing that there was such a thing as a creative department I thought you just get in an ad agency and you make ads so I was in the production department actually and I sort of worked my way up from there I don’t think you can say Steve spent more time in one thing than another really in fact i would guess that he spent more time with the products but he spent a lot of time with the marketing and far more so than any other CEO I’ve ever seen you know normally a big company hires a marketing chief and they do their thing and then at the very end of the process you’ll you’ll share it with the CEO to get a final approval and steve was the advertising guy he had a vice president of advertising of marketing but that person was in the room and would help make decisions but everyone knew that Steve was the guy who made the decision so he was very very active in marketing I know he had a passion for it he thoroughly enjoyed it and I do think that and I saw evidence of it I don’t think he ever conceived a product without thinking about how the marketing would go it was all one thing to him a product that would fit in people live somehow and here’s how we would explain it to them I think the two work together but I think in the end it’s the devices and I one of the things that always bugs me because there are a lot of people out there with anti apple feelings and and one of the popular arguments is that it’s all marketing and that the products are terrible I think the products are fantastic and the marketing exists to throw more fuel on the flame shall we say great marketing doesn’t turn a bad product into a hit I mean a product has to be great so I think Steve Jobs magic was having everything work together and you could see that at one of his product launches he’d be on stage he would announce the product and as people were literally leaving the convention center all the streets of the city would suddenly be alive with posters of the product and the television stations would be running the commercials and it was all one big harmonious you know well orchestrated effort my my personal best marketing moment I suppose you would have to say is the I I didn’t think that the I was going to become nearly as big as it did become I you know it was just a job name a product and we put a lot of effort into it and I Mac was one of the first names that came up with and it felt right for many reasons and there’s a whole story about how Steve did not like it at first and we had to present it two times and he still didn’t like it and it sort of just became the name because it just started to feel better I think after all those meetings but I think for all the hard work I might have done on one campaign or another it’s that little I that you know resonated and became so big that is a personal you know moment of pride for me that I was able to contribute that again no idea was going to be big at the time it’s one of those lucky things at the time you just think oh I came up with a name so I didn’t know was going to get big Steve didn’t know it was going to get big you know we didn’t have anything but computers at the time there were no I devices there were no iPods or anything like that at the time so nobody could really see where that was going but kind of fun to see that it grew into what it did well to keep it in the realm of Apple I would say the power mac g4 cube which a lot of people talk about as one of apple’s great failures and there’s a whole failure story that goes along with that you know the computer came out it was gorgeous it’s in the museum of modern art you know it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen it was just a cube and 80 inch cube with a CD that came off the top like that and it was just gorgeous but it was overpriced so it wasn’t really like you know our fault the marketing people there was a meeting one day that I’ll always remember where Steve came in kind of white you know he was it looked like someone close to him had just passed away or something it was a horrible thing that he just had a meeting on the cube and was told that they couldn’t get the price below 1799 in dollars and he wanted it to be like 1499 it was supposed to be a little higher than an imac it wasn’t supposed to be like a pro machine and yet they couldn’t get the price down so he knew it was a terrible problem from the start and probably because of that Steve was much more sensitive it seemed to the advertising that we created and I have never in my life created so many ads for a single product there were over 50 versions of commercials for the power mac g4 cube and Steve just hated one after the next we had some really good ones in there he had something in his head and we finally got something on the air and the computer didn’t really sell anyway cause it was too expensive so it was a beautiful machine but it will go down in history as an apple unfortunately I think Steve actually did not really want to make a big thing of himself there were a lot of times we would make certain decisions about his role in something and he was kind of shy about it and didn’t want his presence to take away from what the product was I think his focus was always the product so if we suggested that he ever inject himself into that he wasn’t crazy about it and one great example of that is the think different commercial that we started with the commercial called the crazy ones we wanted Steve to be the voiceover for it we thought he had the passion for what we were saying and he resisted that because he didn’t want to be a distraction he didn’t want people to be debating amongst themselves why this egomaniac was presenting himself he wanted to hire a good actor who would do the voice and it would tell the apple story without him getting in the way so I think he there’s another good example for you actually back in the days of next we actually did talk him into being on the cover one of the pieces we created for it and he fought but at that time the next computer was failing and he he was having trouble creating the you know the the initial excitement that he wanted to and we actually talked him into being on the screen of the computer there was like a portrait of Steve Jobs selling you know his new next computer that didn’t work either actually but that was one moment we actually convinced him to step into the limelight to try to sell something I think I learned a lot from steve jobs that has that I’ve applied in other projects that I’ve taken on with other companies and and there are a few of them but you know the things I talk about mostly our focus a lot of advertisers try to say too many things you know I think we were pretty effective with Apple at minimizing the messages and trying to say one thing and say it really well and it’s one of those lessons that it’s very difficult for companies to buy into because they think well there are five amazing things about our product we got to say them all but when you say five things in a commercial it’s harder to remember any one of them as opposed to making a great spot about the one feature so obviously there ways to play that differently in different degrees of success but it’s really about the clarity of the brief I think that’s always an important point like exactly who you’re talking to and what is the one thing that’s going to turn those people on and it is about storytelling as well you know what’s the what are you saying to people that they’re going to relate to and that’s going to keep them interested from start to finish and how does something apply to their lives or whatever I think too many people too many companies too many marketers rely on product features and they they sort of list them and they don’t try hard enough to engage and I think that’s been a strength of Apple is showing people things that make them go wow i’d really like to try that one you know and you know granted not every product in the world can do that if you’re talking about a you know detergent for your washer it’s it’s a little hard but there are lot of great detergent commercials out there as well to that find a way to connect with people that cleanliness in their life or you know whatever it is you’re trying to to sell as opposed to simply saying our wash will be twenty percent brighter than that wash I think it feels very cold so my advice to people is always find that that human connection what’s going to you know what’s that what’s that thing that everyone is going to get very quickly and it will sort of strike to the heart and make you feel an emotional connection with the company and over time if you do that enough you get to be like an apple because people are so attached to apple that it’s hard to pry them loose really and that’s one of the great things about Apple they have a core of customers who who talked about how happy they are to their friends and their family and their colleagues and that’s what you want to create is a brand that people love as I said I am working on a new book the first one was about Apple and how it was obsessed with simplicity and how that translated to success the next book is about how companies all around the world are doing that but it isn’t just Apple there are an awful lot of great business leaders who who understand that that simplicity is a way to reach people but it’s also a weight is a way to design products it’s a way to talk to customers it’s a way to organize a company you know you’re working in a complicated company and you you get frustrated that’s what makes people want to leave so simplicity shows up in so many different places and the leaders who who really leverage the power of simplicity seem to be succeeding more or as they do succeed they do so by connecting more deeply with their customers because simplicity is a basic value we all have I mean nobody would purposefully choose a more complicated way to do something they could do in a simpler way so i think when companies sort of streamline their operations so people r you know there are fewer layers of approvals when you design products so they’re simpler and people don’t have to read manuals you know when you create advertising that says one thing and says it really well i mean all these things together or what made apple so successful and i think to different degrees there a lot of people out there employing the power of simplicity to do great things for there for there businesses for their customers for themselves so there’s a lot of it out there and I’m trying to find it out second write about it and hopefully I’ll be able to do that by the time my deadline gets here
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