The Social

NEW YORK--Broadcast network CBS will be advertising its fall TV season with a video-chip ad embedded in an issue of Entertainment Weekly.

The September 18 issue of the Time Inc.-owned magazine will feature the first video ad to appear in print, George Schweitzer, CBS marketing president, said Wednesday at a press conference at the company's headquarters here.

The ad with embedded video.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

The ad will be launched in partnership with PepsiCo to promote Pepsi Max soda and the TV network's Monday prime-time lineup. Not everyone will be seeing it: the ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to subscribers in the New York and Los Angeles areas--an edition without the video chip will be sent to subscribers elsewhere and show up on newsstands.

The technology for the battery-powered ads was manufactured by a Los Angeles-based company called Americhip, and each ad can handle about 40 minutes of video.

Here are some more details about the Americhip technology: the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320x240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged, believe it or not, with a mini USB cord--there's a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. It's a product that has been in development at Americhip for about two years, spokesman Tim Clegg told CNET News via e-mail.

"It's leadership in innovation, which we really stress at CBS in every part of our company," Schweitzer said of the ads, which were developed with the collaboration of the Ignition Factory, a division of the Omnicom Group's OMD media agency.

PepsiCo has been experimenting with edgy, experimental ads for some time now, distributing millions of 3D glasses for its SoBe LifeWater Super Bowl ad earlier this year. It more recently launched a new Mountain Dew flavor by inviting prominent Twitter users to a party at a trendy Brooklyn venue.

Pepsi Max is the company's new diet soda geared toward men, advertised earlier this summer with bold print ads that declared, "Save the calories for bacon."

"The evolution of marketing television in the fall--it used to be as simple as this," Schweitzer said, holding up a vintage copy of TV Guide. "It was axiomatic in those days. If you took an ad in TV Guide, people watched your program. Not anymore."

Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

This post was updated at 1:38 p.m. PT with more details about Americhip's technology.

In a move that makes him seem a bit like Dr. Evil wanting to be paid one hundred billion dollars for Austin Powers' ransom, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said that he will charge for all the online content associated with the newspapers and television stations he owns.

Rupert Murdoch, media baron

(Credit: Dan Farber/CBS Interactive)

It's a goal that some in the digital-media space will bill as ludicrous--and some as inevitable.

The Financial Times reported the news Thursday, adding that Murdoch had spotted "some good signs of life" in the battered advertising sector.

He's already got most of The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp. acquired two years ago, behind a pay wall. But he also owns the rest of Dow Jones & Company, the Fox television and film empire, the New York Post, and the U.K.'s The Times. News Corp. is also a partner in Hulu, the joint video venture that offers a big chunk of Fox television content (as well as NBC and ABC) for free on the Web.

Robert Iger, the CEO of new Hulu partner Disney, said at a conference last month that he does not believe Web content needs to be offered for free, and that consumers will be willing to pay for it.

"We intend to charge for all our news Web sites," Murdoch said, according to the Financial Times. "If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media."

In late 2007, well before the market collapse last fall, Murdoch had said pretty much the exact opposite, claiming that a free and ad-supported model would be more beneficial than a subscription model for The Wall Street Journal.

Presumably the new paid-content strategy wouldn't apply to News Corp.'s digital-only assets, like social network MySpace.

NEW YORK--According to former Vice President Al Gore, the importance of sustainability doesn't just apply to the environment. It also is key to the future of advertising.

"It really comes out of the environment, but in my opinion the key theme of this century really is sustainability," Gore said. "This theme of environmental sustainability has become a part of our culture, it's a part of our discourse, and I'm very optimistic that it will soon be a part of our policy."

Addressing the crowd of advertisers and online-media types at the Digital Content NewFront event put on by Digitas on Wednesday, Gore was speaking not as a "recovering politician" or a green-tech evangelist, but as the co-founder of Current Media, the experimental cable news channel that relies heavily on user-created content for both editorial and advertisements.

It's about time for our old views of advertising to die, he said.

"In the 20th century, the advertising model was based on the same principles that the Industrial Revolution was based on: scale," Gore said. "It was big, it was blunt, very expensive, and very intrusive, and audiences have now begun to resist that old advertising model even as the environment in which it is presented changes a great deal. The new model is very different because the media landscape is completely different."

More than half of the advertisements on Current are called "VCAMs," or "viewer-created advertising messages," Gore said. These are videos selected out of user submissions for brands interested in advertising on Current; the winner is paid by the advertiser, though it costs significantly less than the production budget of a traditional TV ad, and the winner receives an additional payment if the advertiser wants to use it outside of Current.

It's a model not unlike the wildly successful T-shirt company Threadless, which gets thousands of design submissions and gives a cash prize to the ones that it subsequently prints and sells.

Gore showed off a series of VCAMs proudly, as though they were home videos of his kids: One of them, created by two 24-year-olds, was a Mountain Dew ad about aspiring to be a professional hide-and-seek player. Another, created by a 29-year-old, was a T-Mobile ad showing people excitedly attempting to get picked for a "fave five" as though it were a dodgeball team. Gore mentioned another that was created by a 17-year-old who subsequently received a $50,000 check when the advertiser wanted to use it outside of Current.

There are problems, obviously, which some of the audience members brought up in questions. There are plenty of brands that wouldn't get aspiring filmmakers quite as jazzed as the car and gadget companies whose ads Gore showed off. And while the Flip-camera-toting young adults responsible for Current's VCAMs have the pluck and the free time to run around making commercials, it's easy to theorize that it would be tougher for a network with an older audience to pull it off.

Then there's the fact that while Current has been way ahead of the curve on some digital trends--displaying live Twitter messages onscreen, for example--it's still not a huge media powerhouse. The company canceled its scheduled initial public offering earlier this year, citing the bleak economic climate.

Gore, however, had an example of successful "sustainable advertising" beyond Current. What we can look at, he said, is his old job: politics.

"The most powerful new brand that we've all seen unveiled over the last two years is (Barack Obama)," Gore said, showing a slide of the "O" sunrise logo that became so well known during Obama's successful presidential campaign. "And what is it about this brand that made it so incredibly successful? It was all about empowerment, it was all about involving people to help deliver the message. It was very tuned into the new technologies and how people use them."

Just as the Obama campaign made efficient use of inexpensive marketing and publicity tools on the Web, Gore believes that the digital age has made it possible for high-quality ads to be ubiquitous, rather than just at the one time of the year when people get really pumped about what commercials will be on TV.

"During the Super Bowl, people leave during the game rather than the ads. They want to see the ads because they know something extra has gone into Super Bowl ads," Gore said. "(But) it's not sustainable to have that kind of ad budget and that kind of focused creativity that you find on those ads completely ubiquitous throughout the television year."

At the end of his talk, the former vice president was left speechless when one audience member asked him if he believed that the problem of carbon emissions could be solved by 2029 through the use of technology coming from UFOs.

"No," he said after a long pause. "I do not."

This story has been updated. See below for details.

Can you really take everything that's going on with movies, TV shows, music, Internet memes, and social media, and wrangle it all into an hour of live television? MTV believes it can--with some help from Twitter, Facebook, and a quirky British model-turned-TV-host named Alexa Chung.

The pop-culture cable network's new daily talk show, titled "It's On with Alexa Chung," premieres at noon on June 15 and expectations are high. The show is taking over the time slot once held by "Total Request Live," or "TRL," the music video countdown show that more or less defined MTV--and in turn, mainstream youth culture--in the late '90s and early '00s. Chung, 25, is a British import who's already solidified a reputation as a quirky TV host across the pond, but is largely unknown in the U.S.

But it's the dual partnerships that MTV has inked with Facebook and Twitter that are really generating buzz. There will be on-screen "tweets," content sourced from Facebook profiles and fan pages, audience contribution from polls to remixed YouTube videos, and round-the-clock updates from Chung's own Twitter account. If it's all done right, "Alexa Chung" could be both a milestone in the convergence between TV and the Web, and a fresh infusion of innovation for a TV network that many say was shooting itself in the foot for not catching onto the social media craze earlier.

Still largely unknown in the U.S., the star of the upcoming "It's On with Alexa Chung" has already established herself as a quirky TV host in Britain.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

"The hope is that (social media) will just be something that is like the air that the show breathes on," said Dave Sirulnick, executive vice president of news and broadcast at MTV. "I think our audience, they'll expect this from us. They're going to expect us to talk to them the way they talk to each other. It's the way they experience the world, you know--it would be odd for us to mount this project, put this up on the air, and not have that happen, you know, because our audience, I don't think they look at it as something that is all new. This is just what they've grown up with."

A decade ago, if you wanted to get a message on MTV, your best bet was probably to write it on a poster and join the cheering crowds outside the network's New York studio during a "TRL" taping, hoping to make your way into the scope of the cameras sweeping overhead. Or if you were really lucky, you could call in and have your telephoned questions asked to celebrity guests on-air.

"In the old days our connection to the outside world on 'TRL' was one person on a phone," said executive producer Tim Healy. "Now with this new show it's definitely increased the scope."

MTV canceled "TRL" earlier this year--some would say belatedly. The network's reputation as a hub of pop-culture influence had long since started to fade: New music was being discovered on MySpace pages and niche music blogs. Popular clips from last night's TV shows were swapped via YouTube and Hulu links in instant messages and posts on Facebook profiles. Youth culture had grown segmented and fragmented with the mass availability of niche "long-tail" content on the Web, and social media had thrown out everyone's old notions of shelf lives--a 10-year-old music video can become an overnight hit on YouTube if enough people start telling their friends about it, whereas fresh Internet fads can be eclipsed and forgotten faster than ever. It seemed that when it came to encapsulating the cool-kid zeitgeist, a live TV show just couldn't cut it in the digital age.

With "Alexa Chung," MTV is making a totally different show. The iconic "TRL" set has been converted into something that looks like a loft apartment, with the studio audience scattered around like party guests. There will be no countdown--rather, a talk show format inspired in part by late-night programming, with topics ranging from movies and music to the latest YouTube sensations (whom Chung plans to regularly bring onto the set to see if their singing, dancing, or other oddball talents are for real). And there will be no screaming crowds in Times Square. Instead, there will be tweets.

The tweet smell of success?
"I think the genius of Twitter is that it's in the second. Not even the moment, it's right now," Sirulnick said. "Instant feedback from the audience, from what's going on, will be on-screen. Whether it's a persistent on-screen feed is something we're toying with right now. We haven't entirely decided."

This won't be MTV's first experiment with Twitter. Nearly two years ago, the network started a Twitter account for the "moon man," the mascot for its annual Video Music Awards, as a promotion for the ceremony. It went largely unnoticed: In the summer of 2007, Twitter was hardly a household term.

Alexa Chung, as pictured atop her Web site.

(Credit: http://www.alexachung.co.uk/)

But after unofficial celebrity endorsements and an appearance on Oprah hurtled Twitter into the mainstream earlier this year, the situation is very different. A firestorm of gossip ensued last week when a report in Variety implied that the company was developing a reality TV series. The rumors got so out of hand that co-founder Biz Stone posted a clarification on the company's official blog: "We're not making a TV show," he wrote.

"That was very frustrating and unfortunate, and a misrepresentation of all sorts of things," Chloe Sladden, Twitter's director of business development for global broadcast and news media, told CNET News several days later.

As it turns out, the Variety report detailed one of a number of partnerships that Twitter is working on with media and entertainment companies. That's Sladden's specialty: she was hired by Twitter this spring, after she spent several years working at Current, the edgy cable news channel co-founded by former vice president Al Gore. While at Current, Sladden worked with Twitter to help supplement its 2008 election coverage with on-screen tweets. Now at Twitter full-time, she's helping media outlets--including, but not limited to MTV--integrate tweets, Twitter searches, trending topics, and the like into their broadcasts.

There's no financial transaction involved in the "Alexa Chung" deal, Sladden said, and that's the way Twitter intends it to be.

"We're trying to unlock the true potential of Twitter, and a lot of our strategy has been to let other folks build a lot of cool stuff on top of Twitter. So the model here is much like the application developers," she explained. When it comes to Twitter's media partnerships, "think of this as a creative API."

MTV's partnership with Facebook is a little more formal, and a little more out-of-the-ordinary for both the social network and MTV. "Whenever they have a celebrity guest, they're exclusively featuring Facebook's presence for that celebrity," said Randi Zuckerberg, who heads up marketing at Facebook (and, yes, is founder Mark Zuckerberg's sister). "Which is really cool. The majority of celebrities have Facebook fan pages right now, with thousands or millions of fans." There will also, of course, be a "fan page" for the show itself, where viewers can submit questions to celebrity guests, vote on which songs they want bands to play when they appear live, and provide general feedback.

But in addition to celebrity fan pages, viewers' own Facebook profile content might pop up on the show. "People in the studio audience will have the opportunity to temporarily 'friend' some of the producers," Zuckerberg said. "Basically, they'll 'friend' them for about two hours, the duration of the show, and then they're going to encourage people to do mobile uploads during the show, mobile status updates, mobile photos, et cetera." For those who aren't in the studio audience, questions for the celebrity guests can be accompanied by Facebook photos or other content.

It's still a touchy issue, considering that a lot of Facebook profile content still isn't public, and many people wouldn't want their party photos splashed all over MTV without very explicit permission. And it's a sharp turn from Facebook's erstwhile hardline attitude of keeping everything behind a login wall, which is why representatives from both companies say that the use of Facebook content on TV will be given the kid-glove treatment.

"Everything's going to be signed off on by the people who are asking the questions," Sirulnick said, adding that MTV has been working with Facebook to finalize and streamline consent procedures. "We're not going to be exposing anybody who has not explicitly agreed to have their material on television. It's important to us, it's important to the audience, it's fair. It's important to Facebook."

MTV + Facebook = ad potential
Unlike the Twitter partnership, this isn't a money-free deal. MTV and Facebook have assembled a joint advertising sales team to sell sponsorship packages that encompass both TV spots and social-media ads.

"A sponsor can have placement on the show, commercials or in-show integration, and also integration on Facebook," explained Randi Zuckerberg, who previously helped orchestrate a partnership with broadcast network ABC during the presidential debates last year. "So, they can do an event RSVP ad for their participation in episodes they're in. They can be integrated into the Facebook page for Alexa's show. There's a lot of great things that they can target to fans of a certain celebrity. We're really going out together and really involving sponsors on both Facebook and TV."

This is big news for the nascent social-network advertising market. Plenty of companies aren't yet comfortable putting ads on the likes of Facebook, having heard the rampant belief that returns aren't good.

MTV's Sirulnick said he sees the joint ad sales strategy as a way for longstanding MTV advertisers to take the plunge into social media, for example, "if Sponsor X is a sponsor of MTV, and has been looking to get into the social-networking space, and has been looking for a window in." But he said that MTV will keep the profits from ads on its own properties, and Facebook will do the same for its site. "The MTV and the Facebook sales teams are out there jointly putting together packages for sales, but it's not a revenue share."

Not everyone in digital media is sure that this hybrid of broadcast television and user-generated social-network content will work.

"As a device every now and then it's OK. When it's persistent, it's annoying," said Jim Louderback, CEO of Web video production company Revision3, when asked about the idea of bringing Twitter and Facebook to broadcast television. "Mixing two mediums together like that doesn't work. You lose what makes each medium work really well, and that's why television on the Web is different from Web TV. That's why WebTV from Microsoft didn't work."

That said, MTV executives say that they're shaping and tweaking "It's On with Alexa Chung" up to the moment it airs, and will continue doing so even after the June 15 debut. The network is clearly excited at this chance to reinvent its brand--and to keep reinventing it, ideally preventing it from growing stale the way "TRL" did.

"It's going to be something that every day we're trying to come up with new things (for)," Sirulnick said. "The folks at Facebook are very excited about this, the folks at Twitter are very excited about this, and the good news is that they get us, they get the audience, they know what works really well on their site. And so it's much more, We're just talking all the time."

Alexa Chung herself appears to be equally excited.

"First guests confirmed for my new show. SO GREAT," she posted to her Twitter account on Wednesday. "America can you watch me please?? Cos my mum doesn't live here."

Updated at 5:53 a.m. PDT: MTV has now settled on an official name for the show: "It's On with Alexa Chung."

Social media is coming to Warner Bros. Television Group's online properties, thanks to a smallish AOL property called Socialthing.

A feed of members' activity across Warner Bros. entertainment sites--TheWB.com, KidsWB.com, DC Hero Zone, MomLogic, Essence, and TheCW.com--will be displayed on their Socialthing profiles. So, if you watch a "Gossip Girl" video on TheCW.com or play a game on DC Hero Zone, it'll show up in your feed, and you can keep tabs on what your friends are doing as well (and share bits of content with them). There will also be fictional Socialthing profiles for characters like the "Gossip Girl" cast as part of a broader promotional effort.

As some others have pointed out, it's nice to see AOL finally showing some synergy with parent company Time Warner. You know, before it gets spun off and all.

AOL purchased Socialthing, a would-be competitor to FriendFeed, last summer and integrated it into the "People Networks" division anchored by the company's earlier acquisition of Bebo. Last month, AOL relaunched Socialthing as "a revolutionary new platform that brings social-networking services to Web sites and enables publishers to attract new users and keep them engaged wherever they are on the Web" and announced that it would be working the service into its MediaGlow content network.

From what it sounds like, it won't be all that different to what Viacom has been doing with its own "social platform" technology, Flux. Right now, members can log in with AOL and AIM accounts, but it'll soon be expanded to include Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, and OpenID credentials with the help of the various data portability tools out there.

Disclosure: The CW television network is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

Media-center start-up Boxee, which aggregates Web video for television set-top boxes, has launched a new version that restores access to video hub Hulu. The NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture had pulled its content from Boxee after content partners took issue with it.

But it's not really the same: Boxee has brought back Hulu by extending its support for RSS feeds, and is pulling the video content in that way.

"Like IE, Firefox, or Google Reader, the RSS reader supports Google Video, Yahoo, YouTube and feeds from many other websites," a post on the Boxee blog by CEO Avner Ronen read. "While it's not as attractive or robust as our previous Hulu application, it will additionally support Hulu's public RSS feeds."

Industry talks continue, the post continued. "While we don't come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. It is a complex business. Our meetings with Hulu and their content providers reinforced that point," Ronen wrote. "They are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time."

Wow. With all the drama and in-fighting among cable companies, TV content creators, and Web video companies this week, you'd think the whole industry was one big junior-high cafeteria. Oh, wait, it kind of is.

First, Hulu--a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.--pulled its content from TV.com (which is owned by CBS, publisher of CNET News). Then it did the same with Boxee, a company that makes software designed for watching online video on TVs via set-top boxes. The reason for these measures appears to be either mounting pressure from the TV content owners that have licensed their video to Hulu, or mounting pressure from the cable companies, or both, or something like that.

Now, we've got a report in The Wall Street Journal indicating that cable giants Time Warner Cable and Comcast are in talks with some of the companies that operate pay-cable channels, for a plan to make some of the networks' content available online to subscribers. It'd probably be on a streaming, ad-supported basis, and probably available for free to existing subscribers.

I've been watching all this with quite a bit of curiosity and amusement. You see, I canceled my cable subscription and ditched my TV a few months ago, and have since been relying on a combination of Netflix (which may offer a streaming-only option as early as next year), iTunes, Hulu, and randomly dropping in on friends' apartments if I really, really want to watch something live. If I show up with a pizza and a nice friendly smile, most of them are OK with it.

In this Digital Age, cable subscriptions just seem a bit convoluted to me; no offense to the people who run the Game Show Channel or Boomerang, but those aren't my cup of tea and I'd prefer to not have to pay for them.

If this shadowy, in-the-works cable deal involves any kind of Web-only cable subscription where, say, you can pay by the stream or by the channel, I'd be all for it. And if the content providers finally work things out with the set-top box makers and Web video hubs, it could be terrific for me and other people who've gotten totally fed up with Stone Age TV offerings. For now, however, it's just a dramatic mess and recent signs are indicating that it's taking steps backward as opposed to forward.

Consequently, I'm riding out the storm for now. I'm holding off on purchasing any kind of set-top box--or a television, for that matter--until the future-of-television compass stops wildly spinning. In a few years, I'm sure, the solution to it all will seem like it should've been obvious the whole time.

Isn't that always how these things are?

Spoiler alert: If you really hate reading anything about episodes of Lost that you haven't seen yet--and you haven't seen the episode that first aired Wednesday--you might not want to read ahead.

I know we have more pressing things to talk about these days--the economy, climate change, the new president--but I'm going to barge in this morning with a warning about something a bit more niche.

When you're posting to Twitter about something you're watching on TV, make sure nobody thinks it's really happening!

Background: I've been watching this season of Lost at a local bar that shows it on a couple of massive screens every week. The place is packed full of total fanatics: it's like football, except with flaming arrows in lieu of pigskin. Highly recommended.

So in Wednesday night's episode, something happens. I'm going to be very vague to avoid spoiling it, but basically, there's one point in which a character is holding a gun, and the important part is that we have never learned what said character's name is. There's an argument, and another character, whose name we do know, addresses the anonymous gun-wielder by name. It's a name that would shock even mildly avid Lost-watchers. Most of those in the bar expressed their surprise by gasping, shrieking, or otherwise effusing.

A commercial break followed, and--of course--I posted a Twitter message: "'Put the gun down, [redacted].' OMG WHOA. Whole bar gasped."

Well, a few minutes later I received a direct message from someone I know on Twitter--I'll keep this person anonymous. The message read, "someone pulled out a gun???" Apparently, my Twitter contact hadn't seen the earlier messages that made it clear I was watching Lost and seemed to think I was at a bar where someone had pulled out a gun. Oops.

Luckily, no panic ensued. It was, after all, only a single Twitter post. A few direct messages and a public clarification later, I'd explained the reality of the situation, and my Twitter contact responded with, "There must be a term for this: 'taken out of twontext?'" I'm generally not a fan of corny Twitter puns, but he hit the nail on the head.

I guess putting things into "twontext" is why we have Twitter hash tags, the searchable keywords that many people tack onto the end of Twitter messages, often to tie them to discussion surrounding an event--say, "#davos" for the World Economic Forum or "#inaug09" for this month's presidential inauguration. I typically don't use them unless I'm at a conference where we've been asked to tag for aggregation purposes, but Wednesday night hinted to me that considering how much banter and noise fills up a Twitter feed, it's really easy to get the wrong idea about something.

I mean, goodness knows what might happen on Lost next week.

The fact that the Los Angeles Raiders humiliated the Washington Redskins in a 38-to-9 victory is a mere afterthought. Super Bowl XVIII's lasting legacy has been a single advertisement sandwiched somewhere in the third quarter: Apple Computer's iconic "1984" commercial.

It began, in a clear nod to George Orwell's novel of the same name, with tense strains of music, the image of figures marching through a tube across a dank industrial complex, and the start of a bizarre monologue: "Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives."

Directed by Ridley Scott not long after Blade Runner, "1984" aired on January 22, 1984, and its narrative is now geek canon. Scores of blank-faced people are fixated on a broadcast of a Big Brother figure on a giant television screen, until a woman in bright athletic apparel sprints down a center aisle, wielding a hammer. She hurls it at the screen, which explodes into a bright white light. The expressions on the faces in the crowd morph into fascination.

The science fiction-like display of iconoclasm versus conformity is then explained in a message that appears onscreen: "On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."

In the entertainment industry, it was the dawn of the cinematic Super Bowl ad. For historians, it was a notable moment in Soviet-tinged pop culture. But in the tech world, this was the birth of Apple as we know it--25 years ago this week.

"That was certainly Apple's big debut," said Douglas Raybeck, a professor emeritus in Hamilton College's anthropology department who has written about the Cold War's role in pop culture and admits to being a decades-long Apple fan. "They were around before that. People knew of them. They had had some very clever little ads, but they must have bet the house on that one."

Indeed, they did; and in fact, it's become common knowledge that Apple's board of directors came close to canceling the TV spot altogether. Produced by agency Chiat/Day (which, in its current incarnation as part of TBWA, still creates Apple's ads) with a budget of $900,000, it was also one of the most expensive advertisements in television's history.

Click image for our special
anniversary coverage.

At the time, Apple was a long shot in the nascent PC market share wars and was far eclipsed by IBM in its "Big Blue" heyday: the company was taking a staggering gamble with a highbrow, allegory-infused ad that didn't even display the product onscreen.

"(Apple was) very oblique in the presentation of (its) product," Raybeck commented. "There was no computer shown. None of the marvelous graphics the Mac was capable of were in evidence, and what (was) displayed was very dark. The lighting was dark. The images were dark. And, of course, that was part of what they wanted to get across--that this dark, conforming, restricting environment can be broken through."

"It was a major statement at the time, and it's rare that you make a major statement like that and actually deliver on it in a way that we're still talking about 25 years later," said Ian Schafer, CEO of interactive-ad firm Deep Focus, who says he recalls seeing the Super Bowl airing of the ad as a 9-year-old. "You make a bold statement about a revolution that you are going to start, and it's one that has resulted in the market share that they now have."

Apple didn't keep pushing the "1984" message. Although it went on to win an impressive handful of advertising awards, the commercial was never broadcast again. Nor did it usher in a true explosion of all things Mac. In 1985, founder Steve Jobs left the company after a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, kicking off a decade-long absence.

But "1984" was not forgotten: Its production served as the opening scene of The Pirates of Silicon Valley, the 1999 TV movie about Jobs' early years at Apple and his rivalry with Microsoft founder Bill Gates. And in 2007, the 24-year-old commercial was spoofed in a Web-based attack ad against Sen. Hillary Clinton, then vying for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"It's been 25 years, and I still remember the images," Raybeck said. "So it was, in that sense, very compelling, and I remember them not because I thought at the time, 'Oh, what a brilliant ad.' I later came to believe, 'Oh, what a brilliant ad,' because it sticks with you."

Not to mention the fact that Apple's underlying marketing message has remained arrow-straight over the past two and a half decades.

"In a few years, we may be talking about the 25th anniversary of the Think Different campaign," Ian Schafer said of the Apple ad slogan that first debuted in 1997, shortly after Jobs' return to the company, which placed Apple's logo in photographs of the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and John Lennon.

"That was another way of Apple talking about change, about intellect. You could make an argument that using Gandhi or John Lennon in an advertisement is almost blasphemous because these guys were bigger than whatever advertising claim you were about to make. These guys meant more to the world than your brand could ever be. But again, they were able to pull it off."

The legacy of "1984" remains present, too, in the current string of Mac ads, the witty Get a Mac series, which pit actor Justin Long as a cool-guy "Mac" in jeans and a hoodie against the incarnation of a "PC."

Played by comedian John Hodgman in hideously outdated business-formal attire, the doltishly unflappable thought process of the "PC" evokes a more twee strain of the conformity highlighted in "1984." It's Apple's same message, adapted for an age in which political commentary takes the form of The Colbert Report rather than Brazil.

"It's probably the most explicit statement of, basically, a cultural revolution," Douglas Raybeck said. "This is what they're saying--that this is new and really different and revolutionary."

But as "1984" turns 25, its images of conformity and totalitarianism have grown increasingly sprinkled with irony. It's the irony of the launches of both the iPhone and its iPhone 3G successor, reflected in the faces of the Apple "fanboys" willing to wait in line on the sidewalk for the better part of a week in the midst of a stifling New York summer and then--wait for it--descend into the underground Fifth Avenue store in formation as uniformed Apple retail employees guided them through a gauntlet. As critics of the "Apple cult" have pointed out, they seem to be willing to believe their fearless leader's every word.

The irony of "1984" is there, too, in the conflicting reports over Steve Jobs' health that put the spotlight on Apple's tight-lipped corporate culture and shadowy PR-speak, making Cupertino seem much less like the lone runner and more like the image of Big Brother onscreen. And it was there when journalist Dan Lyons anonymously satirized Apple in his "Fake Steve Jobs" blog, as though the CEO were a corrupt monarch worthy of a Jonathan Swift-like tongue-lashing.

Over the years, Apple's market share has indeed grown, and it has come to be a force in the music and entertainment industries with iTunes and the iPod, not to mention the telecommunications business with the iPhone. Like a populist revolution that becomes a little too successful, its trademark gutsiness and cult following start to look less like a scrappy innovator and more like, well, a sprawling conglomerate bent on global domination.

But even that might not matter. Marketing, even marketing of "1984"-caliber brilliance, has to be bolstered by a worthy product, Ian Schafer said.

"I think that people are willing to look past that," he said of the occasional Apple-Big Brother parallels. "At the end of the day, keep making a great product, keep delivering on your promise, and I will continue to be a loyal consumer. That's the value exchange that happens between a brand and a consumer...(They've) built up enough equity in the consumer's emotional bank account, which Apple can afford to make withdrawals from every so often."

Photos: Mac through the years

See the rest of our Mac anniversary coverage here.