During the last several years, few companies have spent as much money on as many grand-scale advertising campaigns with as much success as AT&T. Their $550 million marketing budget has allowed them to produce (with N.W. Ayer, New York) some of the most influential television and print ads of the 1980's (Fitzgerald, 1989). If their latest series of ads are any indication, AT&T will continue to be a leader in the advertising world, not to mention the telecommunications word, in the 1990's as well.
For years, AT&T was known as king of the heartwarming, all-American, feel-good advertisement. This approach followed the conventional wisdom that in order to persuade people to buy a given product, you had to make them feel good about the product and about themselves. Then, in the late 1980's, AT&T broke new advertising ground with its now-famous "slice of death" ads, in which stark black and white images were used to show the intense anger, anxiety, and frustration of people whose businesses were failing due to bad (i.e. not AT&T) phone service (Lippert, 1989).
These ads were extremely successful, despite the fact that they flew in the face of the accepted tenets of advertising. New psychological research had revealed that ads which produce a certain level of fear/anxiety (but not too much or there is a danger of denial and paralysis) paired with a readily available, specific solution, can be very powerful motivators to buy. The disturbing quality of these ads, therefore, was precisely what made them so highly attention-getting and memorable. However, AT&T apparently decided not to overdo this admittedly heavy-handed technique, and in 1989 they returned to their previous focus on the "happy, happy world of technology." (Lippert, 1989, p.21).
Aimed at small business owners and young entrepreneurs, this next series of seven ads featured an American reporter sent at the last minute to cover the bicentennial of the French Revolutio...