Prahlad Kakkar says it’s difficult to remember even the funniest commercials but the message which introduced Macintosh remains a masterpiece

Advertisements are funny, but they have zero recall value. Their life is as long as they are on onscreen and then they fade away.
It’s a bit old but the 1984 American television commercial that launched the Macintosh personal computer and was created by advertising agency Chiat/Day tops my list of all-time favourites.
I first saw it at an Ad Club screening of award-winning advertisements in Mumbai (it had won the Grand Prix at the 31st Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival) post its launch in the US. A personal attraction was also the fact that it was made by Ridley Scott, a director I admire, at an unheard-of production budget of $900,000.

It had a great concept and was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s dreary vision of a Brave New World and has allusions to George Orwell’s creation, ‘Big Brother,’ who talked to masses from a screen in his futuristic book Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ad begins with men and women dressed alike in monk-like cloaks in a manner discreet enough to hide their physical differentiation. They are sitting in a huge hall with only their eyes open and fixated at a senior head priest, a Big Brother-like character, talking to them from a huge screen on the establishment of a classless, asexual society, where everybody would be equal and there will be no desire.

They are listening to the voice in a spell when in comes a woman in red shorts and a white tank top with a Picasso-style picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer on the top, to represent the coming of the Macintosh. She comes escorted by combat police, shackled with a ball tied to the chain. Suddenly, she breaks free, grabs the chain with the ball at the end and starts rotating it before swinging it at the big screen. The screen breaks into a million pieces, simultaneously breaking the face and its voice’s spell on the monks, as the commercial concludes: ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’

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