The Real Story Behind Apple's ‘Think Different’ Campaign
This post was written by Rob Siltanen, chairman and chief creative officer at Siltanen & Partners. — Apple's remarkable rise, coupled with Steve Jobs' recent death, has prompted quite a few people to reflect on the historical impact of the …
Context & Ripple Effects
Since Steve Jobs' death in October 2011, the reflection has come mostly from outside observers: Neil Kodner analyzed the tribute messages Apple displayed on its own site, and years earlier commentators had dissected the company's positioning from the outside, as in Scobleizer's 2007 take on Apple's brand promise. What this piece adds is a participant's voice: Rob Siltanen, chairman of Siltanen & Partners, writing a first-person account of how the 'Think Different' campaign was actually created.
That matters because 'Think Different' is one of the most-cited artifacts in Apple's mythology, and until now its origin story has been told largely by analysts and biographers rather than by the people in the room. A firsthand claim from the agency side lands squarely in the middle of a canonization moment.
First-order effects
- Siltanen & Partners gains public attribution for one of advertising's most referenced campaigns at the exact moment Apple's history is being written up, converting a decade-old assignment into current agency credibility.
- The account inserts an agency-side version of events into the post-Jobs historical record, competing with the outsider narratives that have dominated since October.
Second-order effects
- Other creatives and executives with a stake in Apple's marketing history face pressure to publish their own recollections while attention is high, fragmenting the official story into competing firsthand accounts.
- Marketers and business schools revisiting Apple as a case study must now weigh participant testimony against the established analyst narratives, changing what counts as the source material.
Third-order effects
- If participants keep bypassing trade press to publish their own histories, campaign authorship becomes contested intellectual property in its own right — part of what agencies can claim, and monetize, long after the work ran.
The trend: Apple's post-Jobs history is being assembled in real time, with first-person accounts from former collaborators now sitting alongside analyst and press narratives as primary sources.