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Party hats and sunglasses on animals are the fart jokes of advertising. Somehow lazyandeffective, shallow yet infectious, and definitely not too tasteless for Gateway 2000 or its wunderkind president.
“I’ve used soap dishes as ashtrays in the best hotels in the world,” Ted Waitt bragged duringone of his New York Times interviews, explaining inanother articlethat he picked his 1990 Porsche Carrera-C4 because it was “the only car I could find that would go 160 miles an hour in the snow with the top down.” Restraint didn’t rocket him or his company to $1 billion in sales over six short years. And it was never a part of the marketing strategy.
The486 Festspread pictured above was eleven pages long. It had 28 wildly unnecessary “Party Reason” subheadings, more than a dozen barnyard puns, and a photo of all 2,000 Gateway 2000 employees in front of the cow-spotted headquarters in Sioux City.
“When I worked at PC Magazine in the early 1990s, Gateway 2000 regularly ran 8-to-12-page ad inserts, often featuring cows, cornball jokes, or both,”Lance Ulanoff wrote earlier this year. And that was never more apparent than the months following the company’s eminently unexpected IPO.
Gateway had opened its first international headquarters in Dublin one month before this ad, selling mail-order computers in Britain (propped up bymarketing in local, region-specific magazines), and working on plans to expand into other parts of Europe.
The “pilgrimage” was not without, uh, trials and tribulations, however, and Waitt’s prayers were not answered (this time, at least. He did go on to fund theexpedition that successfully unearthed the Gospel of Judasin the Egyptian desertbut I digress). The hope was that an IPO would buoy some of the unexpected costs from crossing the Atlantic. A gamble that minted one of America’s first tech billionaires.
By December of 1993, Gateway was runningcheesy 26-page Christmas adsinByteand had expanded from a manure-ridden livestock exchange building to the Nasdaq stock exchange.
A few not-so-obvious things worth noting about this ad include (but are not limited to!):
Sure, the company was hoping to crack the corporate buyer market, but apublic SEC filingclaimed that, until that happened, “over 50% of the Company’s business is believed to be attributable to either previous buyers of Gateway 2000 PCs or new customers referred by previous buyers.” So, in an effort to shore up its base, technical support headcount was doubled, its one-year warranties were tripled, replacement parts were bumped up to one-day deliveries, and the phone lines were open 24 hours.
Still,What’s Luck Got to Do With Itcited a market research studyfrom around this time that claimed 87% of potential buyers knew little to nothing about Gateway 2000, hence the spray-and-pray approach to increasing brand awareness. But surely they could have done better thanJulius Caesar getting stabbed(while buying eucalyptus lip balm?) because “Sometimes it’s hard to know who to trust,” preceded a few pages earlier by theLeaning Tower of Pisa guy opiningthat “Mama-mia! What’sa matta me! That’sa last time I buy a kit from the Towers-R-Us catalog.”
“We get horrible marks from the marketing-guru types,” Waitttold Inc. Magazine a few years earlier. “But it seems to work.” By 1995 Gateway 2000 had purchased additional manufacturing facilities in Virginia and Malaysia, and scooped up an 80% stake in one of Australia’s largest computer retailers–revenues were up to $3.7 billion.