www.sfchron.com

Apple Battles Big Blue in Russia Commercial uses '1984' imagery

By Don Clark
May 27, 1993

Apple Computer wants to free Russia from the shackles of Big Brother — the IBM computer standard. The Cupertino-based company today will try to ignite sales in the former Soviet Union by airing an update of its most famous TV commercial, an eerie homage to George Orwell's novel "1984" that introduced the Macintosh PC during the Super Bowl almost 10 years ago.

The one-day ad blitz is expected to reach 100 million citizens of the former Soviet Union, which is considered a huge potential market by American PC makers.

Apple's ad keeps the original images of stupefied citizens with shaved heads and prison garb, held in thrall by a dictator on a giant video screen. An athletic woman outruns police to hurl a sledgehammer through the screen in a symbolic act of liberation. A new voice-over adds a message in Russian that is a thinly disguised attack on the widespread use of IBM-compatible computers throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States.

"For more than 20 years, Europe, Asia, America — the whole world — all toiled under the dominance of one personal computer system. A system whose flexibility discouraged independent thought and creativity. A system whose power went unchallenged. Until Apple created Macintosh.

"The right to choose. The right to think. The right to be an individual," the ad declares. The campaign is designed to "make a big splash and let people know we are there," an Apple spokeswoman said. By U.S. standards, it's a bargain.

Apple paid about $ 600,000 to create the original ad, and paid $ 800,000 to reach 43 million viewers during one 60-second showing. "1984 Redux," as the ad is called, was revised in Moscow for $ 30,000 and, and for $ 20,000 more, will reach more than twice as many people through several showings today in 15 CIS countries, said Peter Necarsulner, whose San Francisco public relations firm PBN CO. helped update the ad.

The attack on IBM seems somewhat outdated, in view of the fact that Apple and giant IBM are now collaborating on a 1994 generation of Macintoshes that will have a microprocessor and operating system designed with help from Big Blue.

But Apple needs to try something dramatic, some observers say.

Low-cost clones of IBM machines, some of them built in Russia, have long been favored by students and government agencies able to afford them. Although new software copyright laws were passed in October, there is a long-standing tradition of pirated software based on the DOS operating system.

"A lot of the software is stolen and there is nobody to steal Mac software from," said Esther Dyson, a New York computer analyst, during a phone interview from Prague.

Apple's sales in Russia were slowed by export controls on powerful PCs, which were lifted in 1991. Yet competitors that sell even faster machines, such as Mountain View-based Sun Microsystems, managed to build respectable businesses in the Soviet Union, noted Peter Alexander, a Russian emigre and executive vice president of the Berkeley consulting firm Glav/PC.

"To do a commercial on TV tells me that Apple did not define the audience," said Alexander, who thinks the Macintosh is sorely needed in Russia. "The people who see the commercial won't have money to buy one."