Gateway 2000's Hilariously Bad Ads: From Party Hats to Soap Opera Parodies
Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)
Gateway 2000's 90s advertising was a wild ride of barnyard puns, costumed CEOs, and multi-page soap opera parodies. Despite cringe-worthy campaigns, the company's sales soared to $3.7 billion by 1995. This article explores the strategy behind the madness, from Ted Waitt's bravado to the infamous 'As The Hard Drive Turns' series, and how the company's eventual decline mirrored its shift away from quirky branding.
Restraint didn’t rocket him or his company to $1 billion in sales over six short years.
- sgarland
> And you won’t get to brag that you own a computer from Iowa.
South Dakota. Gateway was HQ’d in North Sioux City, SD.
There is also a South Sioux City, NE, though to my knowledge no computer manufacturers have had a presence there.
My dad worked at Gateway in the mid-late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Employee perks were pretty decent for the time; for example, he could borrow a laptop to play with and learn on at home — we used this almost entirely to play games, since we had a hand-me-down 486 at the time. They would also give you a PC in agreement for continued employment for N years. We got a Pentium III 550 MHz screamer of a system, which was absolutely bonkers for my young self.
- ecliptik
The hippie copy mentioned was the ad my dad bought our first PC from. He was coming back from a business trip and asked the company computer guy to help him choose one for our family. We ended up with the 486DX2-50MHz "Integrated VESA System" [1].
Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old.
We got rid of it in the early aughts, but I kept the CPU all these years. Recently I found a similar Gateway slimline desktop (badged a 486DX2-66MHz) and have been using Claude to port things to DOS on it, like Cave Story [2][3]. The original 50MHz CPU still works.
1. https://books.google.com/books?id=L2RD68Gg2sMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...
- incanus77
I worked at a mall Radio Shack in ‘98-‘99. A Gateway store opened up at the other end of the mall. This being the times they were, Radio Shack had partnered with Compaq to sell P2 & (I think) P3 desktops, the beginning of its downfall of selling other companies’ stuff and losing out to places like Best Buy.
We used to emphasize that you could buy a computer with us and go home with it today, whereas down the hall, you could buy it but it would come in the mail later. Their store had demos and the big cow-patterned boxes around, but no inventory.
Also around then, I applied for and got a Gateway-branded, Holstein-patterned credit card, which I promptly maxed out to buy my own first modern computer, a P2 build not from Gateway, but from Midwest Micro. I learned Red Hat Linux on it, reading the manual on break at work even before the computer came, and it began my real career.
So lots of adjacency to Gateway, but no real firsthand experience. They were definitely a force.
- gammarator
As a young Midwestern nerd in the 90s, getting one of those cow boxes delivered to our home was better than Christmas. (Christmas happens every year!). Somehow I can still remember the new computer smell…
- VCFundedGenYer
What exactly was "bad" about these ads? They're eye catching, and it definitely interested me as a reader.
Poor choice of title.