Ken Segall, who named the iMac and worked on the “Think Different” campaign, has some choice takeaways from working with Steve Jobs that he’s finally sharing in book form with Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success.
The cleanly-designed cover in Apple’s signature Myriad typeface looks almost like it should be unboxed; inside you’ll find choice insider tales of the flops, false starts and history made with Apple over the 12 years he worked with the Cupertino company. (You can read an exclusive excerpt from Insanely Simple and our review of the book here.)
Segall tells Cult of Mac about the reasoning behind that lowercase “i,” winning Jobs over and what happened when ads flopped. You can catch up with him through his blog or Facebook page, where you’ll also find details about his upcoming book tour.
According to Ken Segall's new book, "Insanely Simple," Steve Jobs loved the PowerMac G4 Cube, but had to let it die.
Here’s an exclusive excerpt from a new book about Steve Jobs and Apple by ex-advertising Mad Man, Ken Segall. The book is called Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, and it’s on sale tomorrow. In the excerpt, we learn about Steve Jobs’s great reaction to criticism of the infamous hockey puck mouse, how he responded quickly to mistakes, and his attitudes toward the “brand bank.”
Every Cult of Mac reader should know the name Ken Segall. Leander interviewed Ken back in 2009 about naming the iMac and making Apple’s ‘Think Different’ ad campaign. Ken now runs the hilarious Apple parody site called Scoopertino and his personal blog, Observatory.
As a man that worked with Steve Jobs personally, Ken has first-hand knowledge of what drives Apple as a business, and his insights into the creative marketing and branding industry are profound. He’s got a new book coming out called Insanely Simple, and you should be excited to get your hands on this one.
Have you ever wondered what it was like behind the scenes of Apple’s famous ‘Think Different’ advertising campaign? The 1997 ad was mainly attributed to Steve Jobs in Walter Isaacson’s biography, but there’s more to how it all went down.
An advertising executive that helped create the campaign has taken to Forbes to set the record straight, and the truth is that Steve Jobs originally hated the very ad that brought Apple back from the brink of destruction.
We stumbled across this rare video of Steve Jobs at the CAUSE 1998 Conference in Seattle. In the short clip, Steve Jobs gives a particularly comedic and lighthearted talk about the PC and TV.
The video quality is pretty awful, but what’s said in the talk is very interesting. In the video, Jobs says, “TV turns your brain off, PCs turn your brain on.” What most don’t know is that Jobs was quoting a failed campaign for the original iMac.
Despite Google’s position as one of the biggest advertising companies on earth, if you’re a company looking to promote your product, buying ads for an Android device is a pretty dicy proposition when you could buy them on an iOS device instead.
Ken Segall, the advertising guru who named the iMac and coined the “Think Different” slogan, wants to bust what he calls the “last myth about Macs:” security.
Segall takes to task all the usual arguments – Macs are only secure because there aren’t that many of them and that Macs are actually more vulnerable, thanks to the known vulnerabilities.
A fingerpainting of the New York skyline by Benjamin Rabe. Courtesy iAMDA.
Artists who have traded canvases for touch screens and brushes for the Brushes app will meet up at a Digital Art Conference in New York City this weekend.
The iAMDA (International Association of Mobile Digital Artists) has organized its first ever MobileArtCon taking place at the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), October 23-24.
Cult of Mac talked with artist and organizer Matthew Watkins — whom we featured when his iPhone art was the first to hang at an Apple reseller — about what to expect from this weekend meeting of digital artists.
Back in November, our own personal Aleister Crowley of Cult of Mac, Leander, sat down and interviewed Ken Segall, the originator of the iMac name. According to Segall, Steve Jobs recognized he was “betting the company on the machine and so it needed a great name.” The only problem: the name Jobs had his heart set on was so bad it would “curdle your blood.” The original product name? MacMan, says Gizmodo.
Luckily, at the end of the day, iMac won out… but it wasn’t because Jobs let himself be swayed, according to Gizmodo’s sources, but rather because the name was already trademarked by a company called MidiMan, who had released a serial-to-MIDI adapter under that brand name. Apple made an offer; Midiman declined; Steve Jobs fumed and Segall got his way.
![Ken Segall On What Made Apple’s Insanely Simple Approach Work [Q&A]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif)
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![Here’s One Reason You Should Read Ken Segall’s New Book, “Insanely Simple” [Review]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Ken-Segall-c-Doug-Schneider-NEW.jpg "Ken Segall (c) Doug Schneider NEW")
![Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success [Exclusive Book Excerpt]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/170349-steve-jobs.jpg "170349-steve-jobs")
