Steve Jobs rolls out Think Different (September 1997)

The context · why this meeting mattered

September 1997. Steve Jobs had been back at Apple as interim CEO for about two months. The company was 90 days from bankruptcy, by his own later accounting. He had killed the Newton line, killed dozens of products, cut a substantial portion of the workforce, taken a $150M investment from Microsoft, and was about to launch a new visual identity and ad campaign that would tell the world (and the company) what Apple was going to be.

The meeting in the video is internal. The audience is the Apple marketing team, with Jobs presenting the new campaign concept and the agency's work. It is not a polished keynote. It is a working session where the CEO of a struggling company is selling his own team on what they are about to do.

Why marketers should watch this specifically

Many great brand-rollout moments exist in marketing history. This one is the most concentrated because Jobs is doing five things at once, and you can see each one clearly:

1. He is repositioning the company.
2. He is teaching the strategic thinking behind the campaign.
3. He is selling the work to his own team (which is the hardest selling in marketing).
4. He is using the moment to communicate Apple's new direction more broadly.
5. He is modeling the kind of leadership voice he wants the company to operate with.

All five happen in roughly seven minutes. There is almost no slack in the speech. Every sentence is doing something.

The strategic argument Jobs makes

Great brands need investment and caring

Jobs opens by establishing a premise: brand is not free. It is built through sustained investment over time. He uses Nike as the working example, observing that Nike makes commodity products (sneakers) and yet has one of the most valuable brands in the world. The reason, he argues, is that Nike never advertises features or product details. They celebrate athletes. They celebrate athletics. The brand is built on what it stands for, not what it sells.

This is the foundational move of the speech. He uses Nike to validate the strategic choice Apple is about to make.

What Apple stands for

Jobs then articulates what he believes Apple has always stood for — and what the new campaign will make explicit. The Apple of 1997 had lost the thread. Marketing had drifted into product specs and feature comparisons. The new campaign will return to first principles: Apple makes tools for people who change the world. The customer is not a consumer. The customer is a creator.

This is the positioning move. The category Apple wants to play in is not "personal computers." The category is "tools for the people who matter."

The creative work follows the strategic premise

Only after establishing the strategic premise does Jobs show the actual creative — the "Crazy Ones" film developed with TBWA\Chiat\Day. The film celebrates innovators, artists, scientists, and rebels. It does not show a single Apple product. The brand is the celebration. The product is the means.

The sequencing matters. He doesn't say "look at our new ad." He says "here is the strategic framework, here is what we stand for, here is what we are going to celebrate — and here is the creative that delivers it." That's the order in which marketing should always be reviewed. Strategy first, creative second. Most brand-review meetings get this backwards.

The leadership lessons

Aligning vectors through clear vision

One of the often-quoted Jobs lines about leadership is that the role of a CEO is to align all the energy in the company toward a single direction. The speech is that lesson in real time. Jobs is taking a team of marketers — many of whom had been at Apple through years of strategic drift — and giving them a single, clear story they can carry forward. After this meeting, the marketing team has a shared answer to "what are we doing and why?"

Selling internally before selling externally

The campaign would launch publicly in late 1997 and run for years. But in this footage, the audience is internal. Jobs understands that if the team doesn't believe the campaign, the campaign won't be executed with care. So the first sale is to the team. The meeting itself is part of the campaign rollout — not a prelude to it.

Vision plus tangible solution

What separates this speech from a generic "we need to think bigger" pep talk is the tangibility. Jobs isn't selling a feeling. He is selling a specific creative direction, a specific media plan, a specific positioning, with a specific agency that has done specific work. The vision is wrapped around something concrete the team can act on tomorrow.

The "Crazy Ones" creative

The campaign's anchor piece is the film commonly known as "Crazy Ones" — a one-minute spot featuring footage of historical figures (Einstein, Gandhi, Dylan, King, Earhart, Picasso, Hitchcock, and many others) over a voiceover honoring people who think differently. The voiceover was performed by Richard Dreyfuss in the final aired version, and reportedly by Jobs himself in an earlier cut.

The text of the voiceover (often called the "Here's to the crazy ones" monologue) is owned by Apple and TBWA\Chiat\Day. We will not reproduce it here. It is widely available, including via the YouTube video linked above. We recommend watching it in the original context.

The creative endured because it does what Jobs argued in the strategy section of the speech: it does not sell a product. It declares an identity. Customers who saw themselves in the celebrated figures formed a connection to Apple as a brand. That connection compounded across two decades of product launches.

Why this still matters in 2026

The temptation in 2026, with AI-generated creative making it cheap to produce thousands of variants, is to optimize at the variant level and forget the strategic level. Jobs's speech is the antidote.

You cannot A/B test your way to a brand identity. You can A/B test your way to better headlines within an identity. The identity itself has to be decided — by humans with strategic clarity, articulated in language that a team can carry, anchored in something the audience genuinely cares about.

The brands that will compound in the era of AI-cheap-creative are the ones that have done the strategic identity work that Jobs is modeling in this speech. The brands that haven't will get faster at producing more of the same forgettable creative.

The broader lessons for marketers and leaders

• Treat brand as investment, not expense. Brands compound over years. Discounting brand investment when budget is tight is the modern equivalent of eating your seed corn.
• Celebrate the customer, not the product. The most enduring brand campaigns position the customer as the hero. The product is the means.
• Strategy first, creative second. Bad strategy with great creative is forgettable. Great strategy with adequate creative compounds.
• Sell to your team first. Marketing executed by a team that doesn't believe in it is marketing that won't be executed with care.
• Vision needs tangibility. Vague aspirations don't drive behavior. Concrete creative does.
• Use reference points your audience already accepts. Jobs used Nike. Find your equivalent.

Suggested viewing approach

1. Watch the speech once, without taking notes. Just absorb the pacing.
2. Read the historical context — Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs covers this period in detail.
3. Watch a second time and identify the five things he's doing simultaneously.
4. Watch a third time as preparation for the next major creative or brand decision you have to make at your own company.
5. Watch annually. Bring it to your team when you are kicking off a brand-defining campaign of your own.

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