Sixty seconds. Apple has never kept a permanent official upload, so this is the best copy going.
In January 1984 nobody wanted a personal computer because nobody could explain what one was for, and the category was owned by IBM so completely the industry phrase was “IBM and the seven dwarfs”. If people cannot evaluate the product, give them a side to be on instead.
Cast your competitor as Big Brother, in the actual year of the actual book, and never mention them.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Spend most of a launch budget on one sixty-second film that never shows the product, never names a feature and is directed as a dystopian sci-fi short. Air it once. Do it for a company whose own board has just called the ad a disaster and instructed the agency to sell the airtime back.
Smart: The Super Bowl is the only place where “aired once” still means 43 million people at the same second, and once is precisely what made it news rather than advertising. All three networks and around fifty local stations replayed it inside news programmes, for free.
The steal: when your product is genuinely hard to explain, stop explaining. Give the audience a side instead of a spec, and pick an enemy so large that naming them would be beneath you.
Straight talk: the first hundred days were a triumph, 72,000 Macs against a far lower forecast, and then sales stalled badly, the 128K did not have the memory to do what the ad implied, and Jobs was out by 1985. The greatest commercial ever made sits on top of a launch that went sideways within a year.
That Lee Clow and Jay Chiat held the line after the client's own board called it a mistake. That part never appears in the case film.
Craft-poweredScott's direction is what makes a novel reference feel like an event. Has to be seen to work.
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: