Category: Tech and Innovation Ads

A small gear starts to turn, and it nudges another part, which nudges another, in a chain reaction that rolls, drops, spins and bounces its way across a warehouse floor for two minutes straight. Every piece in the shot is a real component of a Honda Accord: gearbox parts, hoses, seats, wheels, even the fuel cap, all rigged to trigger the next one like an enormous Rube Goldberg machine.

The film, known as “Cog,” was made in 2003 by the agency Wieden+Kennedy and directed by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet for the production company Partizan Midi Minuit. The team spent months on conceptual drawings and testing before filming, and the finished sequence used almost no CGI, only a small amount to fix a reflection in the car’s window at the very end.

Getting the chain reaction to run all the way through without a single part failing took an enormous number of attempts, and accounts of exactly how many takes it required still disagree today. The full two-minute version was expensive to air because of its length, so it was reportedly broadcast on British television only about ten times over ten days in April 2003, plus screenings in a few other countries and in cinemas.

Rarity did not stop it from becoming one of the most awarded commercials ever made, picking up a Grand Clio, Gold Lions at Cannes and prizes from the Creative Circle, among many others. It closes on a simple line: “Isn’t it nice when things just… work?” Two years later, Wieden+Kennedy and Honda followed it with another acclaimed spot, “Grrr,” which won the Cannes Grand Prix.

On November 6, 2005, Sony needed a way to convince British TV audiences that its new Bravia LCD sets could show colour like nothing else on the market. Rather than shoot a studio close-up of a screen, agency Fallon London and director Nicolai Fuglsig decided to answer the brief with colour itself: no television in sight, just 250,000 bouncy balls let loose down the steepest street in San Francisco.

What makes the film remarkable is what is missing from it: any CGI at all. Every ball bouncing past parked cars and down a steep San Francisco hill was real, released from trucks and captured in-camera with no visual effects whatsoever. The crew spent weeks phoning every funfair operator and toy distributor they could find just to source enough balls, then set them loose to the hushed, downtempo sound of Jose Gonzalez’s cover of “Heartbeats.”

The shoot did not go quietly. Loose balls dented 32 parked cars and cracked windows on six houses along the route, and it took a cleanup crew of 45 people to sweep the streets afterward. Even so, more than a thousand balls were never recovered, quietly rolling into storm drains and gardens around the city, an odd little footnote residents still bring up when the ad comes up in conversation.

“Balls” went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes and is still taught as a case study in advertising schools for a simple reason: at a time when digital effects could fake almost anything, Sony proved that doing something for real was still the most persuasive trick in the book. The film’s success was big enough that Sony returned the following year with a follow-up, “Paint,” trading bouncy balls for exploding fireworks of colour.

A guy in jeans introduces himself as a Mac. A guy in a beige suit introduces himself as a PC. That’s it — that’s the whole format, repeated dozens of times over three years, and it became one of the most recognizable advertising bits of the 2000s.

Apple and agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab launched “Get a Mac” in May 2006, casting actor Justin Long as the relaxed, casually dressed Mac and writer-actor John Hodgman as the stiff, suit-wearing PC. Each thirty-second spot dropped the pair into an empty white space for a short exchange about one specific pain point of using a Windows computer — viruses, forced restarts, bloated software — with the PC always coming off worse. No product shots, no spec sheets, just two characters and a punchline.

The format was simple enough to repeat endlessly without wearing out its welcome, running new installments through 2009 across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan (the UK version swapped in comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb). “Hello, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC” became a cultural catchphrase, parodied on late-night television and eventually provoking Microsoft into its own direct-response campaign, “I’m a PC.”

Apple’s share of the personal computer market roughly doubled over the campaign’s run, and analysts routinely point to “Get a Mac” as a case study in building a brand identity out of personality rather than features. Nearly two decades later, the pairing of a laid-back guy and a guy in a suit is still shorthand for the entire Mac-versus-PC rivalry.

There is no computer in this commercial. No mouse, no monitor, no product shot, no price, no feature list. For a company that had just posted a $1 billion annual loss and was ninety days from running out of cash by some estimates, that omission was either reckless or the smartest move Apple ever made.

Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple in 1997 after twelve years away, and the company he came back to barely resembled the one he’d co-founded. TBWA\Chiat\Day, the same agency behind Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl spot, was brought back in to help rebuild the brand from nothing but reputation.

Junior art director Craig Tanimoto pitched pairing the Apple name with 20th-century figures who’d changed their fields: Einstein, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, John Lennon, Picasso. Copywriter Rob Siltanen and creative director Ken Segall built the words around them, a free-verse piece that began, according to the finished spot, with a tribute to misfits and troublemakers who refuse to accept the world as they find it.

Jobs recorded his own narration for an internal version, but the read that actually aired belonged to actor Richard Dreyfuss. Black-and-white archival footage of each figure rolled under his voice, ending on the two words that would define Apple’s identity for the next five years: think different, grammatically loose on purpose.

Thirteen years earlier, Apple had introduced itself to the world with a very different kind of ad — a sledgehammer thrown at a screen instead of a slogan read over faces. Both spots share the same instinct: sell a worldview, not a spec sheet.