Content Marketing Today

Steve Jobs Does it Again: Sometimes the Perfect Visual May be All You Need

With Apple, a visual is worth a billion dollars. That was true 24 years ago.  And it was true this week at MacWorld.

When 1984 was not 1984.  The introduction of the original Apple Macintosh.

Steve Jobs is justifiably famous for his sense of design.  It has carried through from the very first Mac in 1984 to the iPod to the iPhone and  into the seductive layout of the Apple stores. That brilliant sense of design has also translated into awesome Apple advertising through the use of unforgettable visual imagery. 

At the introduction of the first Macintosh in 1984, Apple created a commercial designed to run just one time during the Super Bowl.  Back then, IBM with its relatively new PC was seen by some as an enemy  just as evil as Big Brother from Orwell’s novel, 1984.  The commercial famously showed a young woman flinging a sledgehammer through a giant screen that projected the image of Big Brother.

Those of us who saw the commercial live will never forget it. There was sound in the commercial but it was the powerful visual that hammered home the point that a brand-new type of personal computing was going to shatter the overbearing regime of the then dominant IBM.

Introduction of the MacBook Air– the envelope please!

You can certainly talk about how thin a laptop is.  You can provide its measurements.  You can mention that it’s a very light. In fact, if it had been Dell or HP introducing a new and very slender laptop, they might very well done something relatively pedestrian that would have been soon forgotten.

That’s not the Apple approach. They understand the power of the perfect visual. 

Steve Jobs once again used an unforgettable visual metaphor in his MacWorld keynote. If you missed it, you’ll see it again in a series of television commercials.   A slender manila envelope appears and is held as if it contained something that was neither fat nor heavy.  It might well have been 50 pages of 8.5 x 11 paper.

What emerged from the envelope was, of course, the new MacBook Air.  The visual made the point.  Words were almost superfluous. 

Moreover, after you’ve been enticed to go to the Apple website because of the commercial, you’re entertained by more highly visual content for every single product and service that Apple offers. 

When you want to make a vitally important point, try to conjure up and display the perfect visual metaphor.  You may be able to leave words behind, while leaving behind an indelible memory.

Thin is in.