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PC Computing Jul ‘93 via Archive.org
Party hats and sunglasses on animals are the fart jokes of advertising. Somehow lazy and effective, 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 during one of his New York Times interviews , explaining in another article that 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.
The 486 Fest spread 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.
Byte Nov ‘93 via byte.tsundoku.io
Gateway had opened its first international headquarters in Dublin one month before this ad, selling mail-order computers in Britain (propped up by marketing 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 the expedition that successfully unearthed the Gospel of Judas in the Egyptian desert but 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.
“Gateway hit the market at $15 a share. It shot up, then dipped and is now double the original trading price,” according to one article two-years post offering . “Forget that Waitt owns only one suit (a bad-fitting one, to boot), typically sports blue jeans and seldom wears socks, when he hit Wall Street, he blew away any notions by investment bankers that they were dealing with a rube.”
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