Apple, Advertised

A lone runner hurls a sledgehammer through a screen of Big Brother, freeing a grey dystopia. Aired nationally just once — and instantly rewrote the rules of advertising. “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

The doomed follow-up to “1984”: blindfolded businesspeople whistling as they march off a cliff. It insulted the very customers it courted, flopped hard, and helped get the agency briefly fired.

Black-and-white footage of Einstein, Gandhi, Earhart and Dylan over a manifesto for misfits and rebels. It announced Steve Jobs’ return and reminded the world what Apple was for.

Jeff Goldblum drawls his way through the Bondi-blue iMac’s pitch: there’s no step three. The internet, in a translucent egg, simple enough that the ad barely had to explain it.

Black dancers on saturated colour fields, white earbuds glowing, set to Jet, Feist and U2. The white cord became a status symbol you could spot across a subway car.

A cool young “Mac” and a stuffy, virus-ridden “PC” stand on white limbo for 66 deadpan spots. The most successful campaign of its decade — and the one that taught a generation to roll its eyes at Windows.

A montage of film and TV legends — Lucy, Bogart, E.T. — answering phones and saying “hello,” ending on the new iPhone. Aired during the Oscars, months before anyone could buy one.

A simple demo format that minted a catchphrase so durable Apple trademarked it. Whatever you needed — a level, a translator, a guitar tuner — “there’s an app for that.”

A sullen teen seems glued to his phone all Christmas — until he plays back the family movie he was quietly filming the whole time. It won an Emmy and made a lot of people cry into their eggnog.

Jony Ive, near-whispering over soft light and slow motion: “This is it. This is what matters.” A pure-design brand spot with no products in sight — Apple asserting its soul during a rocky stretch.

Apple plastered billboards worldwide with photos taken by ordinary owners, credited by name. The ultimate flex — the camera is so good the customers make the ads — and a Cannes Grand Prix winner.

FKA twigs comes home, plays a song, and her cramped apartment stretches and warps into a euphoric dance. Directed by Spike Jonze, it’s less an ad than a music video — and one of Apple’s most beautiful.

A man slips in his AirPods and the city becomes a trampoline — he bounces off pavement, walls and rooftops to Anderson .Paak. Pure kinetic joy, selling wireless freedom without a word of copy.

A scrappy office team scrambles to land a pizza-box account, using Macs and iPhones at every turn. A long-running comedy series that quietly doubles as a product demo — and got sharper through the pandemic.

People overshare wildly in public — then the spots snap to the iPhone locking it all away. Apple turned privacy into a marketing weapon, drawing a sharp line between itself and the ad-funded competition.

A giant hydraulic press flattens a tower of cameras, instruments and art supplies into a slim iPad. Meant to show everything the iPad contains, it instead read as Big Tech crushing human creativity — and Apple publicly apologised.