tl;dr While I do exaggerate the “badness” of 80s tech ads to make things more fun, a nostalgic ad is not the same thing as an effective ad. What we see in advertising today is so depressing because it is often so bland AND more effective than its more playful predecessors. 

It is impossible to define a bad ad. What convinces you to buy something and what convinces me to buy something are totally different, even if we are the same age, in the same income bracket, have the same interests, and live in the same geographic location or time period. Change any one of those variables (or one of the millions I didn’t mention) and an advertisement’s effectiveness, what The Suits call its “conversion rate,” lands in the gutter. 

I am not and do not purport to be an all-knowing advertising critic. And this newsletter is first and foremost interested in tech ads that are wistful and funny and weird. But as that is an extraordinarily wide net, I have added the dimension that most (although not all!) must also fit into my definition of “bad advertising” to be featured in this newsletter.

The most common fault I have found with ads in BYTE, PC World, and other computer magazines from the 80s and 90s is that they often lack any clarity or specificity. If you spend more time on some convoluted metaphor involving wizardry and magic (like Computer-Mate Inc. so often did) than on your product itself, potential buyers will turn the page before even knowing what you sell.

Another thing I see a lot is ads that totally misunderstand their target audience. The PowerPad, for example, was explicitly intended for power users (it literally came with a developer kit) and kindergarten classrooms. Leonardo DaVinci finger-painting the Mona Lisa doesn’t cater to either.

And, as much as I appreciate the value of brightly colored and perfectly staged designs nestled in 300-page magazines stuffed with boring monochrome product specs, I constantly find ads that swung too far in the other direction. Midwest Micro’s five-page, Clue-inspired ad, for example, had horrid fonts, overcrowded visuals, and bombastic storytelling so distracting I can’t remember what they were even selling.

Still, as much as often as I label them as bad, maligning their meaningless, incorrect, or otherwise problematic headlines, I love these ads. They make me sentimental for my childhood, when computers were more fun and experimental. Oppressive and annoying and uninteresting as today’s tech marketing is, its messaging is almost always more effective at moving product than what you see from 80s computer magazines. That’s worth thinking about.

In this newsletter, bad is not binary. Modern advertising is bad in the sense that it is worse for the soul, but good for corporate coffers. The ads in this newsletter are bad in the sense that they did not convince people of the era to buy their wares, but good at reminding us that everything need not be pulverized into its purest and most potent form to be worth remembering.