Thought Different – RIP Steve Jobs

Bill Bernbach revolutionized the ad industry from the inside back in the 60s.

Steve Jobs revolutionized it from the outside in the 90s. (Depending on where in the globe you were plying your trade.) In Scotland, they think an Apple Mac is a new dessert at McDonald’s.

Admittedly, Bernbach changed the way we think, Jobs changed the way we do.

But our industry has never been the same since. I doubt there are many art directors and writers, (not to mention designers), who don’t have a Mac on their desk or in their bag.

Ask anyone who owns a Mac and they’ll tell you they’ll never touch a PC again.

They just work, better.

Not content with revolutionizing the advertising and design industry, he also set about working his magic on the music and telecommunications industries too.

Tell me, how did we live without our iPhones?

Here are a couple of ads paying homage to Steve Jobs. I’ve selected these because they are my favourites. But you can see more here:

http://adsoftheworld.com/blog/steve_jobs_homage_ads

Agency: Bang In The Middle, Guraon, India.

Agency: DDB Dubai, UAE.

If you’re not in the ad industry and you’re reading this, then you might not ‘get’ the ‘Thought Different’ homage to Jobs. It is based on an ad campaign which was about “crazy people” who thought differently.

Interestingly, if they made this TV ad today, Steve Jobs would be in it.

Apparently, Steve Jobs is doing the VO in this version. (Later to be revoiced by Richard Dreyfuss.)

I don’t know Steve Jobs, so I’m pretty sure, like the rest of us, he has a few skeletons in the cupboard. Some scarier than others. And I’m also pretty sure that there are quite a lot of other unsung people at Apple who have contributed to the company’s meteoric rise to world domination. But… let’s let the poor fella go cold before we start vilifying him.

Like it or not, Steve Jobs was a visionary.

You have 30 seconds to relax…

The other day, instead of doing something useful like bettering myself, I was taking a little time-out to play solitaire on my phone. (Sometimes I think it’s this kind of lack of commitment to work that the economy’s in the state it’s in.)

Anyhoop, it was a new app I’d downloaded so I was having quite a few go’s. After game 5 or so, a message flashed up saying: New fastest time!

I hadn’t realised I was playing against the clock.

I hadn’t even realised I was actually ‘playing’ against anybody or anything.

I don’t know about you, but when I play solitaire I do it to relax. Not to flap through a deck of cards like David Blaine on Soho market.

At first, I did try to beat my previous time. But I soon found that I was getting myself all in a tizzy because I’d only got 10 seconds before I slipped further down my own self-imposed rankings.

This was no way to live life.

So I got one of those little red stickers, the sort you see next to paintings in an art gallery, and I put it over the timer on my phone.

So now, when I’m playing solitaire, I’m blissfully unaware of just how pathetically slow I am.

It’s much more relaxing.

Bit of a bugger when I’m texting though.

What’s next – Speed meditating?

(P.S. If you do want to know: 2’54″)