AT&T Advertising Campaigns

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

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ntercut interviews with Germans at the wall and Americans with German relatives. All express their joy at the destruction of the wall, and all refer to their gratitude for the telephone as the only means to stay in touch when the Cold War was at its most frigid. The Berlin Wall is rapidly becoming a popular backdrop for many U.S. advertisers, including Pepsi-Cola, General Electric, and the perfume company Quintessence, as well as AT&T (Freeman & Levin, 1989). The Hurricane Hugo/San Francisco earthquake ads amount to what one writer has called a "three-minute docuboast" about the outstanding performance of AT&T's personnel and equipment during and following these two disasters. Documentary-style footage of uprooted trees and collapsed buildings are accompanied by voiceover recollections of AT&T employees and others involved in the disasters. The unseen narrators say things like "Our AT&T telephone technicians, they were here, they left their homes and their families, and they were devoted enough to this institution and AT&T to make everything work." (Garfield, 198, p.72). Following this spate of relatively traditional sentimentality, success stories, and general heartstring-tugging, AT&T apparently decided the time was right
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1553
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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