We love it when we identify fellow subscribers to the Sawtooth philosophy of “truth” – particularly heavy hitters like Bob Garfield. He noted in last week’s Adage that the reason he placed Apple’s advertising campaigns among the best of the century is due to one simple fact: that they are true.
The most compelling piece of the article for us is the articulation of the relationship between ethos of the consumer and the truth inherent in the Apple brand as espoused by Steve Jobs.
Until recently, I had failed to notice the central genius behind the Apple ethic.
It was true.
Not just shrewd, not just potent, but literally true. So admirable was the advertising for understanding the iconoclastic psychology of the audience and for flattering random graphic designers as heroic subversives, I never noticed that the positioning was rooted in reality. Steve Jobs was a bona fide liberator. A revolutionary. A visionary leader. First, he liberated his customers from DOS. Then from Windows. Later he would use digital technology not to speed up and quicken cel animation, but to Pixar it into near irrelevance. Then, with the iPod, he consigned the recording industry and much of terrestrial radio into similar near oblivion. His iPhone revolutionized the hand-held world and his iPad is only just beginning to alter publishing on a grand scale. And with each such effort, he pried the thumb of some Big Brother-like monopolist off our slavish selves. He wasn’t merely a canny psychologist with an eye for design. He was Moses in a turtleneck.