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- [00:01]
Phil Agnew
Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification. In early 1984, Apple released an ad which is widely regarded as one of the greatest advertisements ever made. Advertising Age named it the greatest commercial of all time. In 1995, TV Guide ranked it as the number one greatest commercial of all time. In 1999 it won the Grand Prix at the 1984 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival and and was included in the Clio Award hall of fame in 1995. More importantly, immediately following the ad's airing, Apple reportedly sold a record $3.5 million worth of Macintosh computers. They couldn't keep up with the sales. But today's guest on Nudge says the ad success was a fairly shocking surprise because just the year before, Apple created a very similar ad that was a dramatic failure. In 1983, Apple created an ad with a Hollywood director, a celebrity movie star, a beautiful aesthetic, and yet it flopped. In 1984, Apple did the same thing with the same agency, but created what today's guest says is one of the.
- [01:21]
Will Storr
Greatest kind of ants ever, ever made.
- [01:24]
Phil Agnew
So how did Apple go from failure to Success in just 12 months? Find out in today's episode of Nudge.
- [01:34]
Unknown
If you're in marketing, sales or leadership and you're serious about staying ahead, mark your calendar for inbound 2025. Happening September 3rd to 5th at the.
- [01:45]
Phil Agnew
Moscone center in San Francisco. Inbound is genuinely, I think, one of the best major marketing sales leaderships events. I went last year and I thought.
- [01:55]
Unknown
It was absolutely fantastic.
- [01:57]
Phil Agnew
But this year looks even better.
- [01:58]
Unknown
The speaker lineup is genuinely world class. They've got Amy Poehler, Dario Amodei, Sean Evans from the hot ones YouTube channel. I'm a big fan of that. Plus Marques Brownlee, Glennon Doyle, Dominique Cren and Mike Benson, the CMO of cbs. An incredible lineup and over three days you'll get evidence backed strategies for marketing leadership and growth. It's delivered by people who shape the future of business and practitioners. I know Nancy Harhurt, former guest on Nudge, will be there as well, and if her talk is anything to go by, this conference will have no fluff. It'll have no filler, it'll just have insights that you can actually use to improve your work. And it's in San Francisco. You got the tech scene as the backdrop. It's the ideal place to explore how AI and behavioral science are reshaping the industry. So if you want to be part of it, if you want to head along, go to inbound.com register to secure.
- [02:54]
Phil Agnew
Your spot My guest on Nudge today is an award winning author whose best selling books, the Science of Storytelling, Selfie and the Status Game have earned wide acclaim. Rory Sutherland says today's guest is a genius and that his writing is so good he'd happily read one of his shopping lists.
- [03:12]
Will Storr
My name is Will Storr. I'm a former journalist and author who has a specialist interest in the science of storytelling.
- [03:19]
Phil Agnew
I've spoken to Will about his previous books on Nudge before, but I think his latest book is probably his best.
- [03:24]
Will Storr
The new book is called A Story is a Deal and it's a look at the science of how people use storytelling to influence, lead and persuade.
- [03:34]
Phil Agnew
Will starts his book with the surprising story behind Apple's famous ad.
- [03:39]
Will Storr
I was sort of slightly nervous about talking about Apple in a book about business storytelling because everyone talks about Apple, but then I realized that not Apple is not talking about Shakespeare in a book about conventional storytelling. Like they're the Steve Jobs era of Apple was like the greatest ever period of business storytelling. It was, you know, he was, he had a masterful instinct for this stuff. And everybody, I, I suspect that the advert that you know about is 1984 because everybody knows that ad, the first Mac ad, which was extraordinarily successful. And you know, what I didn't realize before I'd done my research was that it also sold, you know, huge volumes of computers. They, they, they couldn't supply enough computers to, to fill the demand. And this is when the Mac cost, I think it was about seven and a half grand in today's money, something like that. So extremely expensive. But what I didn't realise, and I think what other people didn't realize is that the year before that very famous 1984 Mac ad, they also tried to do a business storytelling solution to sell the forerunner to the Mac, which was the Lisa. So kind of similar computer, even more expensive than the Mac, but revolutionary, you know, a genuinely revolutionary device in that it was the first personal computer to have a mouse, windows, expandable menus, all the stuff that we take for granted these days.
- [04:47]
Phil Agnew
In 1983, Apple put together this demo to inform staff how impressive the Lisa computer was.
- [04:54]
Unknown
That was a great presentation you made in there. Do you know I put together that entire project, including the presentation slides just this morning.
- [05:02]
Phil Agnew
Had your whole department working on it, huh?
- [05:04]
Unknown
No, I used my new LISA personal computer. A personal computer did all of that? That's right. Incredible. The Lisa computer is incredible. In just a few moments it helped me adjust a schedule chart update an entire Budget, write a mem, some graphics and create a distribution list.
- [05:25]
Will Storr
And so they thought, you know, how are we going to promote this thing? Well, we're going to tell a story. We're going to do storytelling. So they got their, you know, very flash ad agency, Chait Day. They got Hollywood director Adrian Lin, made so much for Flashdance to make a film with Kevin Costner. And the film is called Breakfast, they've called Breakfast. And it's a beautifully shot thing. You know, the sun's coming up. There's Kevin Costner riding his bike. He does feel very flash dance. There's lots of beautiful music. And he does all this computer work. He's got a little dog with him. And then the phone rings.
- [06:02]
Unknown
There'll be just two kinds of people.
- [06:05]
Phil Agnew
Hi.
- [06:05]
Will Storr
He tells his wife he's going to be back soon for breakfast. Yeah, I'll be home for breakfast. And, you know, I think the idea being that this guy's a super hard worker. And in order to be a super successful, hard, handsome worker, you need a Mac. It was a total disaster, that ad campaign. Nobody remembers it today. It's completely lost the rabbit hole of the other thing. You know, the other ads for it were just big, big ads in the New York Times, et cetera, just listing all the. There weren't even stories that were just listing all the benefits of the Lisa.
- [06:33]
Unknown
Spreadsheet, modeling charts and graphs, list management, text processing, project management and presentation graphics.
- [06:42]
Will Storr
And then the next year they had this computer, the Mac. They didn't even really know what was going to be yet because it hadn't really finished inventing it when they. Look when they launched this ad at the Super Bowl. But it was the same thing. It was the same ad agency. They used a Hollywood director and this time Ridley Scott to tell the story. And this very famous example, it shows this kind of totalitarian hellscape.
- [07:03]
Phil Agnew
Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary.
- [07:06]
Will Storr
This sort of barking, hectoring, kind of patriarchal leader in control of these kind of gray drone people. And through the middle of this horrible sort of depressing scene comes this amazing, empowered, multicolored woman with his lovely Apple top on, with a hammer. And she smashes the hammer through the. Through the horrible totalitarian man.
- [07:32]
Unknown
On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
- [07:43]
Will Storr
And this ad was incredibly successful. Like, just enormously successful. Like, it was immediately what we would call today viral. Like, the evening after it was broadcast. News stations across America would. Were making news stories about this incredible advert, and it's still considered one of the greatest kind of ads ever made. And indeed, one expert that I read and quoted in the book, and I agree with him, says it didn't just redefine Apple, it redefined how we see personal computers into the Silicon Valley social media age. We now see personal computers as this kind of individualistic, creative thing that people use to make their own lives better. In the book, I asked why did the one ad work and not the other ad? One of the fundamental things that they got wrong with breakfast was it wasn't telling a story like it thought it was telling a story because it was by Adrian Lynn and had Kevin Costner in it doing some stuff, but it wasn't telling a story. Like, you know, one of the most fundamental properties of a story is that it's describes the overcoming of an obstacle in pursuit of a goal. Like, if you don't have a character or characters overcoming an obstacle in pursuit of a goal, you don't have a story, you just have, I don't know, an event like, you know, something or a scene. So. So, you know, without those elements, there's no drama, there's no emotion, there's nothing to stick in your head, there's no one to care about. It was just a man on a phone telling his wife he's going to come home from breakfast. You know, it was rubbish. So that's the most fundamental thing. But, but also there was nothing for people to identify with. They thought that by giving him a dog, that that's actually what they thought. I found this interview with, with the guy who made it. By giving him a dog, you were going to identify him because people like people with dogs. This is crazy, but, but the 1994 ad really did strike a chord with people at the time. And to understand quite how, you've got to go back to the 1980s and this is the era in which Silicon Valley wasn't the home of these kind of like flashy domestic products like Facebook and Google and Apple and all these, you know, Microsoft isn't Silicon Valley, is it? But, you know, LinkedIn, all these other Silicon Valley companies, it was the home of the military industrial complex. So people were scared of computers. They thought that computers were going to be something that were going to maybe take over the world one day, or leaders in leaders genuinely into a totalitarian future. This was, you know, before the Berlin Wall had come down, people were still scared of the, the communist menace. What, you know, a huge field would have been 2001, A Space Odyssey, which showed a computer taking over a spaceship and killing everybody on board it. The year before that ad, there'd been War Games, a massive Hollywood blockbuster which showed a big mainframe computer almost starting World War 3 with Soviet Union and destroying the world. So that's what people thought about computers. And so Apple was saying, in that story, we see your concerns. We reflect your concerns. But with that, you know, if you put your support behind Apple, it's not going to be like that. It's going to be freedom and creativity and individuality and progress. So it was a. It was a really powerful set of ideas that they were directly tapping into. And I think that, that, that, you know, those are the two reasons, I think, why it was so successful. One is that it was actually a story, and two, it was a story that people could strongly identify with.
- [10:55]
Phil Agnew
Stories dramatically change our perception. They don't just change how we view ads and products. They change how we view art. In 2013, several researchers asked 120 participants to view paintings by cubist artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Leger. First, the researchers recorded people's reactions to the paintings alone. And the first reactions weren't great. Cubist paintings don't exactly grip the average person. But then the scientists included the backstories behind each of the paintings. Meanings and brief histories of the painters and brief histories of the painters themselves. With these backstories, the audience ratings improved dramatically. These abstract works suddenly took on meaning. In his book Hitmakers, Derek Thompson writes that suddenly learning this story behind the piece made the viewers enjoy the art more. And stories won't just alter our enjoyment, but they can also alter our purchases. In 2009, researchers Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn created the Significant Objects Project, an experiment that aimed to quantify the impact of storytelling for everyday items. The researchers purchased inexpensive items from thrift stores and garage sales, spending a total of $128. Next, they commissioned professional writers to create fictional stories about each object. These items, along with their stories, were listed on ebay. But I should say the ebay listing clearly said that the stories were fictional. Despite that, the products gained an extraordinary demand. They sold the objects for a combined total of $3,612, a profit of almost three and a half grand. A ceramic horse, purchased for just 99 cents, sold for $62. After being paired with a compelling story about its past, a pink plastic horse bought for $1 sold for $104. When accompanied with an interesting backstory, we have what behavioral scientists call a story bias. A bias for objects, paintings and ads that have a compelling story behind them. But why, why do we have this story bias?
- [13:07]
Will Storr
This is kind of really the fundamental idea that drives the whole book, really. And in a nutshell, if I can quickly talk through the entire history of life on Earth, if you trace your, if you trace your family tree back 3.8 billion years, you're going to find this, a single cell bacteria, like a single cell bacteria is the, the earliest form of life on Earth. It's, it's, you know, it's where we all come from. And a single cell bacteria is, is this little machine for overcoming obstacles in pursuit of goals. That's what it, that's what it does and it's very good at doing that. But its behavior is kind of, is reflexive. So it's algorithmic, it's very rigid. You know, it's basically if the conditions outside my cell are X, I'm going to do Y. If they're A, I'm going to do B. So, you know, that can be very effective. But the problem with that is that it's just not very good for coping with environments that are unpredictable. And of course, most environments are unpredictable. So then hundreds of millions of years after coming up with this reflexive technology, evolution comes up with a new technology to help living organisms overcome obstacles in pursuit of goals. And that new technology is the feeling of emotion system. You know, feelings and emotions. And so feelings, feelings are amazing because they don't instruct their owner what to do, they just advise their owner what to do. So if you're, if you're a mouse in an alleyway and you know someone's left half a Greg sausage roll across the alleyway, your, your feeling of hunger is going to draw you towards the sausage roll. But then you see a cat, you know, on a roof staring at you and you've got a new emotion, which is fear. And so, you know, by measuring those emotions, fear versus hunger, you can make a decision. You're not slave to your kind of algorithm. So, you know, incredib technology, obviously the feeding emotion system. You know, animals have this and you know, insects to some limited degree have this, although insects are also quite algorithmic. And then between 50 and 100,000 years ago, evolution comes up with a brand new technology to facilitate the overcoming obstacles in pursuit of goals and that story. And you know, humans remain the only animal to have the ability to use storytelling. And it's really the secret of our success. You know, humans, we're one of five existing species of great ape, but we're obviously different to our other, our ape relatives. And the difference is that we are, we've become part ape, part ant, that we overcome the obstacles in pursuit of goals, partly like apes, so partly in the form of ant like super organisms. And what I mean by superorganism is the organism itself is the, is the thing that solves problems and deals with problems. And it's made up of numerous humans. And each human is playing its individual role, knows what it has to do in order to help the superorganism win.
- [15:45]
Phil Agnew
By superorganism will means humans can group together in what he calls the superorganism to accomplish things that wouldn't be possible if we were just working alone. We create these superorganisms through stories. He writes that the core function of storytelling is to create a sense of a shared reality. Storytelling acts as a brain fusing device, aligning individuals towards common goals and creating a unified understanding within groups.
- [16:12]
Will Storr
And that's all of human life. That's a company, that's a political party, that's a cult, that's a religion, that's a football team. That's what we do as humans. We solve the problems of existence cooperatively. We would die in days if we were the only person left on Earth because we wouldn't be able to support ourselves.
- [16:27]
Phil Agnew
Research by the anthropologist Dr. Polly Vesna shows that stories are distinctly important to humans. She spent her time with the Yuhuanzi Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth, with genetic lineages going back over 100,000 years. The group is almost entirely isolated, spanning Namibia and Botswana, and it remains fairly disconnected from modern society. In her studies, Polly found that each night around the campfire, 81% of the time was spent telling often highly entertaining stories about fellow tribe members. She writes how the listeners are stunned with suspense, rolling with laughter, close to tears, and emotions are synchronised to. Because everybody is relating to one story. Stories are a fundamental part of human civilization.
- [17:16]
Will Storr
How does that, how does that work? How do you get, you know, all of our ant, sorry, ant, all of our ape ancestors pursue, solve their problems as individuals. So how do you get individual great ape brains to fuse together, to come together and all work together in the form of this superorganism? And the answer is with story. That's what story does. A story kind of takes over your mind. It tells you a story about tomorrow, you know, the thing that we're trying to achieve. It tells you how we're going to get there, what you've got to do to achieve it. And it tells you who you've got to be in order to achieve that thing. So that's what story is. It's a device for fusing lots and lots of human brains together in order that we achieve goals. I mean, one of the most fundamental ways of thinking about this is that there's a, a very famous biologist, evolution biologist, called Michael Tomasello, who once wrote that it's impossible to imagine two chimpanzees picking up a log together and carrying it to another place in order to build something. Even that basic level of cooperation would never happen with a chimpanzee, our closest relative. Whereas, of course, that's very basic to humans. But in order to do that, you've got to tell a story about the future. Hey, dude, if we pick up this log and we get a few logs and we chuck them over there, they might make a nice base for a camp, you know, or whatever it might be, you know, that, that's a story about the future. So, so, so that's, that's, that, that's, that's how it works. And as I say in the book, you can feel that happening whenever you go to the cinema. When you go to the Cinema, you know, 200 individuals will sit down in front of a screen and then if the film is any good, for the 90 minutes, two hours of the film, their consciousness vanishes of their own life. And they all experience the consciousness of the film, of the story, and, and experience the, the ups and downs and fortunes and misfortunes of the characters on the screen. So they become as one in the, in that, in that cinema and that story, you know, working as it's supposed to. That, that's, that, that, that's what it's supposed to do. It takes over our brains and replaces our individual consciousness with the group consciousness. And, you know, that's how a religion works, that's how a cult works, that's how a political party works it. You know, we, we, we absorb the story of the group and, you know, become a member of that group that's sort of existing at the centre of its story.
- [19:30]
Phil Agnew
Apple's 1984 ad is largely considered the greatest ad of all time. Their 1983 ad is almost entirely forgotten. Both had Hollywood directors, both had a huge production cost and both had prominent ad placements. But it was the story that made the difference. Stories bind us together. They are fundamental to our humanity. They make us spend more on random ebay items and appreciate Picasso's more as well. But that's not all. After the break, Will shares how Stories convinced Brazilians to donate their organs, and I'll run a quick experiment to test the story bias on you. All of that coming up. The Hustle Daily show is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the.
- [20:14]
Unknown
Audio destination for business professionals. The Hustle Daily show is a fantastic show. I had the pleasure of watching the Hustle Daily show live at the last Inbound conference in Boston and I loved it. The wonderful hosts share these really informative takes on business and tech news, but it's in a fairly laid back style. It's really easy to listen to. It's quite conversational. I think it's fantastic. They've recently done a fantastic episode on why tequila brands are failing and how you can turn greenhouse gases into butter. Both of those are excellent. I really recommend you go and give that show a listen. So so go and listen to the Hustle Daily show wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:53]
Phil Agnew
Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. We've heard how stories help us collaborate, encourage us to spend more and appreciate art more. But stories also help US Remember Apple's 1984 ad is more memorable than its 1983 ad because it had a clear storyline. To try and prove this, I'm going to run an experiment on you. This experiment was first documented by the psychologists John Bradford and Marceia Johnson, and it involves memory. I will read a passage and you must try and remember as much of the passage as possible. Don't take any notes. Just try to keep as much of the information as possible in your mind. Okay, here we go. The procedure is actually quite simple. First, arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup. Depending on how you've created, one pile may be all there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities, that is the next step. Otherwise you're pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any particular endeavour. That is, it is better to do few things at once rather than too many. In the short run, this may not seem important, but complications from doing too many can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. The manipulation of the appropriate mechanisms should be self explanatory and we need not dwell on that here. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated, however soon it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one can never tell. The two researchers shared this deliberately ambiguous passage with Dozens of participants who were asked to each remember as much of the passage as possible. They found that very few of the participants remembered more than one or two of the sentences. What can you remember? Have a think. Can you remember any of the steps? Can you remember any of the lines? I said off by heart? Probably not. The researchers then shared the same passage with another group, but gave them a storyline. They said this passage describes the process of washing clothes. They then read the passage. The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup, depending on what you've created, one pile may be all there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities, that is the next step. Otherwise you are pretty well set, and so on. Now the participants comprehension and recall improved significantly. They remembered most of the steps. Having that backstory helped the participants remember something that beforehand was entirely abstract. Just like the two Apple ads, the story helps the passage stick in the mind. Stories make things more memorable, but they also persuade people to take actions that may seem extreme. At first. I asked Will to share an example from Brazil where football fans were persuaded to carry organ donor cards.
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Will Storr
And that example that you mentioned, Sports Club Recif, you know, like a Brazilian football team, very passionate set of supporters. And the task was to increase organ donation. So, you know, hearts, kidneys, eyeballs, all that kind of thing. And so they come in this sort of mad advertising campaign that was basically saying if you, you know, get, get one of, sign one of our organ donation cards which is, you know, emblazoned with the, the colors of Sports Club receive. You will help a sports club receive fans see, you know, be a fan. Even after you die, your heart is going to go on beating even after you die. In the body of a Sports Club receive fan, your eyes are going to help another sports club receive fan watch their team even after you die.
- [24:24]
Phil Agnew
The ad is kind of bizarre. You have one man who's in need of an eye trial transplant promising fans that their eyes will keep on watching Sport Club Recif. A younger man says, your lungs will keep breathing for the club. And this woman who needs a heart transplant says, your heart will forever beat for Sports Club Recif.
- [24:42]
Will Storr
And it was just incredibly successful. I mean that, you know, that like, yeah, everybody wanted this card organization sort of figures went through the roof. You know, it saved lives, it, it transformed lives. And yeah, it's a pure appeal to identity.
- [24:59]
Phil Agnew
In the year following the campaign's launch, 51,000 cards were distributed and organ donations rose by 54% for the first time in history the waiting list for both heart and corneal transplants fell to zero. Fernando Figueria, the director of heart transplants at the Institute of Integrated medicine, told the BBC, we used to perform five or seven heart transplants a year, but last year we achieved 28. It was an incredible increase. The persuas attempt worked so well because it connected people with a shared identity, even if it was achieved in a fairly bizarre way.
- [25:33]
Will Storr
I know I did say in the book, it's a weird. It's a weird idea. It's really odd, like it's really creepy. But the thing is, it worked. It was hugely successful.
- [25:44]
Phil Agnew
Stories bind us together. Stories about our favourite football teams might encourage us to donate our lungs. Stories about washing up procedures boost our recall. Stories about Picasso make staring at his artwork more enjoyable. Stories, even fake ones about everyday objects make them sell for more on ebay. And it was a story, a good story, that turned Apple's 1984 ad into one of the greatest of all time. That is all for today, folks. A big, big thank you for Will for coming back on Nudge. He's a fantastic guest and I think he's an even better author. His book A Story is a Deal is absolutely brilliant. I've left a link to it in the Show Notes if you would like a copy, but Will and I didn't finish our discussion there. In fact, we did go on to record a bonus episode. On the bonus episode, Will told me about a study where charity fundraisers dramatically increased their donations by simply telling donors, this is the last time we'll contact you to learn why that is. It's really genuinely quite interesting and to hear how you could apply that at your company or as a marketer. Just go and listen to the bonus episode. To get access, just click the link in the Show Notes. You have to enter your email, but then you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode. It's on YouTube. You'll be able to see a video of both of us as well. If you are already on my email newsletter list, then just click the link in today's email. You'll find the bonus episode there. Otherwise, just click the link in the Show Notes, drop your email in and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode. And Will will explain why telling someone that they can refuse something might make them more likely to act. That is all for now. I do hope you go and tune into that bonus episode and I will see the rest of you next Monday. Cheers.