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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

Credit to @Stammy on Twitter who shared this over there. Thought everyone here would find this pretty cool. I'm a sucker for this era of advertising. This is a particularly beautiful spread, and super cool to see a snapshot of that moment in time and how Apple was positioning this brand new product.

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Also a sucker for this kind of advertising. Advertising used to have a lot more copy. I have a book full of this stuff from Taschen called, appropriately, “The Copy Book.”

The copy heavy ad style also seemed to have influenced Korean PC magazine ads in 1980s https://www.comworld.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=48910

80s was really exciting time for PC because it was pre-mainstream.

You savored everything that you can about it, including ad copies. Good times.

You might like Ted Nelson's Junk Mail Cartons:

https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail

As I recall (it's been years), David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Ad Man has a bunch of examples of this. Yes, a lot of advertising used to be very copy heavy and that's almost disappeared (or at least migrated to other forms like content marketing).

Book noted, thanks. I also enjoy reading: How to Create Advertising That Sells Ad by David Ogilvy [1972]

https://borakaizen.medium.com/how-to-create-advertising-that...

Agreed! I was also reminded how Apple's marketing has been so good for nearly 40 years - if you look at other tech ads from the early 80s, they're nearly always overloaded with tech jargon and don't nearly speak as well to the "what can I create with this?" question that Apple does.

Also, though, it's always interesting to reflect on the ways society has changed. I am 100% sure no copy editor would allow "Goo Goo Gai Pan" to be the name of their fake baby food today, nor lines like "Yuppie generation now breeding like bunnies."

Thanks for sharing! I’m also a fan of ads from this era and had to tweet about it

Worth reading "Ogilvy on Advertising" if you're into this stuff. I know Ogilvy & Mathers (famous advertising firm) had Apple as an account in the mid 80s.

Is this a fact? I know that Ogilvy & Mather did a lot of famous work for IBM, while Apple's main agency was Chiat/Day for years, if not decades since at least 1983. Chiat/Day created the iconic "1984" TV ad as well as the "Think Different" campaign, among lots of other famous Apple ads.

There's a great book "Chiat/Day - the first twenty years" with a lot of ads for Apple and other brands.

I was curious about the sales impact of the 1984 ad, so I did a little googling. It turns out you're right (see [1] and [2]).

Steve Hayden created the 1984 ad while at Chiat-Day. He later went on to work for Ogilvy, so that's probably where the mis-attribution came from.

What's interesting is that he's the same person who created the Lemmings ad a year later. The 1984 ad resulted in a huge boom in sales. The Lemmings ad did just the opposite. Apple closed a bunch of plants and had a big layoff. Then Jobs left Apple. weird turn of events.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Hayden#From_first_jobs_t...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/allenstjohn/2012/02/02/the-supe...

Edit: fixed typos

You're right; I'm sorry to have spread disinformation!

Looks like Apple switched from Chiat/Day to BBDO in 1986. Around the same time Steve Hayden made the same move... and Steve Hayden didn't move to Ogilvy until 1994.

I have Ogilvy on Advertising, found it cheap at a used book store.

The book is worthwhile for all the examples of real ads done by his agency. The writing itself is nice, but hugely out of date, as it describes a pre-internet, largely brand and image-driven approach to creative ads.

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