Apple Takes Home Top Honors in Adweek's Best of the 2000s

Apple has taken home top honors in six different categories of Adweek's Best of the 2000s.

To wind up the 21st century's first decade, we've spent the past month working on a list of the best and brightest in the branding, marketing, media and agency world in 33 categories over the past 10 years.

Marketer of the Decade (Steve Jobs):
When Steve Jobs returned to a struggling Apple in 1997, he brought back his original agency, TBWAChiatDay, with specific instructions: Buy us some time. Jobs knew that the iMac could well save the company he'd founded in 1976 (he'd left a decade later, after a management shakeup)—but the new model was 12 months off. Meanwhile, to let the world know Apple was not going away, Jobs needed a rallying cry—something to remind the core following of Apple's rebel spirit. The result: "Think different."...


Brand of the Decade (Apple):
In terms of politics and world events, this has been a wild decade, but on the marketing front, one thing has remained constant: Apple's emotional connection to consumers, who reward it with an almost cult-like loyalty. Though the brand almost petered out in the '90s, last year consumers told Interbrand that Apple was the thing they couldn't live without and the one they found most inspiring...

Product of the Decade (iPod):
It was mid-October 2001. The country was reeling from the 9/11 attacks, but the folks at Apple sent out their invitations anyway. The event would unveil a new device that HQ had kept under tight wraps. All the invitation said was: "Hint: It's not a Mac." And it wasn't. It was called the iPod—a "personal jukebox" that defines the '00s the way the Sony Walkman did the '80s...

Campaign of the Decade (Apple, "Get a Mac"):
Apple always diverged from the "speeds and feeds" ads associated with the computer category, but the brand really defined itself with the 2006 launch of TBWAMedia Arts Lab's "Get a Mac" campaign. That series of 60-plus ads brought some humanity into the equation by turning the machines into live-action cartoons. In so doing, the comic spots offer transparent understanding of the aspirations of its audience and how people identify—and connect emotionally—with technology...

Out-of-Home Ad of the Decade (Apple, "Silhouettes"):
You'd have thought Andy Warhol did them—and why not? In the end, the work was nearly as iconic. Perennially at work on new ways to brand Apple's products, TBWAMedia Arts Lab took the wraps off of "Silhouettes" in 2003. It didn't just brand the iPod—it immortalized it. Eschewing a workaday product shot, "Silhouettes" shows the frenetic happiness caused by the product—in a series of literal silhouettes, freeze-frame shots of people dancing with their iPods in hand.


Digital Campaign of the Decade (Nike Plus):
If there was a knock against Nike Plus from the ad world, it was what it wasn't: an ad. Which was, of course, the point. Created in 2006, it defined how a brand can build a self-sustaining platform by giving customers an easy tool—a chip in their shoe that connects to their iPod music player—to track and share their training progress...

Hit the link below to check out all 33 categories.

Read More [via MacRumors]