How often do you stare at a tech ad when you flip through a tech magazine or look at any of the tech websites? It is said that every tech ad attracts readers' attention for not more than 3 seconds on average or they are usually completed ignored.
The problem with tech ads are that they are too technical and at the same time they need to be highly to engage readers' attention. Way back in the 1980s, printed tech ads were funny and creative.
Here are 10 attractive and highly creative tech print ads from well-known companies that caught the eyeballs of the reader during the 1980s:
The “PC Pedestal” by Curtis Computer was one of the first computer accessories to let you easily tilt and rotate your computer CRT screen. The pedestal cost just $79 in 1982. It’s also fun to look at the other gear on the model’s desk: huge copies of dBase, VisiCalc, and an early IBM word processor application, Easy Writer II.PCMAG.COMWhen talked about fighting bugs, it meant that we are fighting virtual bugs in a video game. Bug Off from Bella Software offered 15 difficulty levels. Once again, even though the game requires a “color/graphics board” the ad art was probably nothing like the actual game play.PCMAG.COMThis ProWriter dot-matrix printer ad looks like the WordPerfect ad. There are some subtle differences, including the fact that there’s some sort of creature typing the image on the paper, making this ad somewhat more sedate than WordPerfect’s electrified head.PCMAG.COMHere’s an ad that probably wouldn’t run today (for obvious reasons). In any case, the first line of copy is priceless: “As a man of the cloth, I have wed many couples. But never have I seen a more perfect couple than IBM and Corus.” Talk about high-concept. An early NAS-like device the Corvus offered a whopping 80 million bytes of “mass storage” which is about 80MBPCMAG.COMIn the ad the alien inhabitants think the “only good human is a dead one!” There’s lots of sizzle in the description and image but little that actually tells you what game play is like. In fact, it’s unlikely the real game looked anything like the image in this ad.PCMAG.COMEarly business servers used floppies, and the 5.25-inch disks that most people used with IBM PCs were considered a huge innovation. These early single-sided disks held a whopping 1MB of storage. Fun fact: Even though the disks were now hard, we still called them floppies.PCMAG.COMCharlie Chaplin appeared early on IBM PC ads before “Charlie bit someone’s finger” on YouTube, No, that isn’t the real Charlie. Chaplin appeared in print and television ads. Worth noting in the ad is the push-button phone and the modem on which the handset is resting.PCMAG.COM
