The Consumer Republic

Day of the Dead What do Albert Einstein, Maria Callas, Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Bernbach, John Lennon and Pablo Picasso have in common? If you answered that all of them appear in Apple's "Think Different" campaign, you're half right. But they also share another distinct characteristic: They're all dead. Mind you, this isn't a criticism. To the contrary, this campaign's resurrection of dead heroes of the 20th century is the most contemporary thing about it. After all, Apple has tried to buff its image before by rubbing up against living celebrity iconoclasts, such as William Burroughs and George Clinton, but to little avail. They just didn't have the warmth, the gravitas, the sheer star power of these late great heroes who stare out at us from the black-and-white past. The Apple campaign is pitched perfectly to match the fin de sicle mood. Whenever the end of an era approaches and people feel the future pressing in upon them, culture tends to take a necrophilic turn. In our case, fascination with the past is a little more hysterical, thanks to the coming millennium, and a lot more hallucinatory, thanks to proliferating media that will rob any grave to feed their hunger for content. If you consider all the recycled rock songs and resurrected sitcoms that fill our contemporary cultural landscape, it's clear that being dead is very "now." And TBWA Chiat/Day's "Think Different" heroes are not just dead; many have been dead for a long time. A lot of them made their creative breakthroughs before World War II. In fact, if you were to judge the 20th century by these picks alone, you'd figure the creative life of our epoch ended sometime around 1970--and we've been feeding off the corpses ever since. That's odd when you consider we live in an age in which thinking different is a civic responsibility and innovation a moral imperative. So why do we have to search into the past to find people who actually practiced either? Have you noticed, for example, how often you encounter the deceased in the pages of The New Yorker? The 32nd anniversary of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Diana Trilling's evening at the JFK White House and even the life and times of Frank Sinatra (for whom John Lahr wrote an obituary even though he's still breathing) have all been dug up in recent months. In the same way, exhumed fiction by dead authors gets the full New Yorker publicity treatment while the living ones languish unpromoted in the middle of the book. A reader suspects the dead get more ink because the editors find them more interesting. I don't blame them. Many of the magazine's pieces focus on contemporary life, which seems to center on murder trials, media moguls and marketing whizzes. Speaking of media and marketing, not every icon in the Apple pantheon of differentness has shuffled off this mortal coil. But the artists and political activists among the living honorees-- Bob Dylan and Rosa Parks--are objects of nostalgia. The giants of today are found among entrepreneurial businessmen: media empire-builder Ted Turner and Virgin brand maestro Richard Branson, who star in TV ads that strategically are almost indistinguishable from Microsoft's recent celebrification of the design director of Ian Shrager's hotels. Thanks, but if I'm looking for heroes to make me feel good about being different, I'll stick with Martha Graham and Gandhi. Speaking as a passionate if frustrated Mac user, I agree that "different" is the right positioning for Apple as it fights off the threat of extinction. Every time I shop for software, I experience, through my lack of choices, how different I really am. To be compared to a protean artist is very flattering, even though I know that being an oddball consumer is not quite the same as being Pablo Picasso. But then, being Richard Branson is not the same as being Pablo Picasso, either. I'd like to think there are modern-day Picassos out there, but if there are, they're unlikely to make it into this campaign. Contemporaries with ad-ready faces are more likely to be famous precisely because they think just like a Branson or a Turner. From British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Apple Computers itself, everyone is the business of brand building. In the '90s, we extol thinking different, but we reward people who think the same. If you don't believe me, try playing a game I suspect devotees of this campaign are already playing: Choose three candidates fit for a place on the "Think Different" honor roll. They have to meet three criteria: They must have a high-enough celebrity quotient to be recognized by Apple's target market. They have to be real innovators. And--to make it challenging--they can't be businesspeople. Where will you find them, among the quick or the dead? My three picks would be George Balanchine, Coco Chanel and Charlie Parker. May they rest in peace.

Brand Marketing

The Consumer Republic

Debra Goldman

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Debra Goldman