We turned Apple's 1984 into a website ad.

Better Website Co. is a retainer client — we handle their content and creative strategy on an ongoing basis. Somewhere in that work, a problem kept surfacing that a normal UGC video wasn't going to solve.

A wave of self-styled "website gurus" had started building sites purely with AI tools and calling it a service. To someone scrolling past quickly, that can look like the same thing Better Website Co. does. It isn't — but saying "we're different" in a talking-head video doesn't land. Nobody believes a brand that tells you it's different; they believe a brand that shows you.

So the question wasn't "how do we advertise a website service." It was "how do we make the difference between us and a template-farm impossible to miss." That's a positioning problem before it's a video problem, and it needed a bigger swing than a hook-and-demo format could give it.

Why 1984

Apple's 1984 ad never mentions a single product feature. It sets up a grey, uniform world of people who've stopped thinking for themselves, then breaks it. That's the same shape as the actual argument: a growing crowd of interchangeable, AI-only "website builders" on one side, and a founder who understands design, writing, storytelling and psychology — using AI as a tool, not a substitute for that experience — on the other.

Once the parallel was there, the execution followed it directly: rows of identical desks, identical screens, the same "Welcome to our company" template cycling past face after face. Then the break in the pattern.

How it was actually made

The whole thing was built from AI-generated stills, animated into motion, then edited together with sound design and a soundtrack built to carry the tension — this is the "AI-assisted production" pillar in practice, not just a label. AI made the shots possible on a retainer budget that was never going to cover an actual dystopian warehouse set. It didn't write the idea, and it didn't decide that 1984 was the right reference — that came from actually understanding what the client's problem was first.

That's the distinction the ad itself is arguing for, which is either a nice bit of symmetry or the whole reason it worked, depending on how cynical you want to be about it.

The lesson, if there is one

Conceptual advertising doesn't start with "let's make something cinematic." It starts with a real, specific claim a brand needs to make, that a straightforward format can't make convincingly. The reference (1984, in this case) is just the closest existing shape for the argument you already have. Reach for the metaphor after you know what you're arguing, not before.

You can watch the finished piece — along with the rest of Better Website Co.'s work — on the portfolio wall.