You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
AT&T telecom services

The Promotions:

The Pitch:
Only thing we couldn’t predict was what a mistake buying Warner Bros. would be.

In case you missed the tiny copyright notice that appeared at the start of each commercial, I should make clear that these ads are all from the mid-90’s. That’s what makes them so interesting to look at in hindsight, because almost everything they predicted was bang-on accurate.

We’re all, I think, used to predictions about future technology being all sorts of inaccurate. We expect them to grossly overestimate the practicality of some technologies (where’s my jetpack, huh?) while underestimating developments in others (even when we colonize Mars, we’ll still need milkmen).

So it’s weird seeing ads from thirty years ago not only be right about what technologies would exist in the future, but also be right about how common they’d be and what sort of practical uses we’d find for them. About the only things they got wrong are renewing your driver’s license from a cash machine, and that most of this fancy telecom stuff would still be done from stationary devices, rather than on a little doodad that fits in our pockets.

Of course, if AT&T had tried promising folks modern day smartphones back in the Nineties, people probably would’ve thought they were just being silly, and the ads wouldn’t have been as effective.