The Secret Story Behind Apple’s “Lemmings”
After the pitch, GE decided to go with another agency, and all those weeks of late nights turned out to be for naught. Both Uncle Sam and Lemmings ended up in the dead file.
Some time later, we received a communique from the LA office. Given all the attention that had been focused on Apple and Chiat/Day for the extraordinary 1984 commercial, the quest was on for an equally powerful follow-up in the next Super Bowl. The LA office was struggling to come up with worthy ideas and they invited the NY office to help. The focus for the new ad would be Apple’s push into business with a combination of hardware and software called the Macintosh Office.
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If you know the story of 1984, you know that the idea struck when the LA creative people were searching for inspiration, pouring through old presentations to see if there might be a spark of an idea. They came across a print ad with the headline, “Why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” That got their attention. The rest is history.
Well, a similar thing happened in the NY office in the search for a new Apple Super Bowl idea. Someone had the great idea to look at the work that had been done for GE. And there it was — Lemmings, in all of its glory.
