A (1995) company that made nothing but bad ads
5 pages of the worst typography I've ever seen in a magazine.
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Excuse the unannounced hiatus. I have been abroad. Well, that and digesting this disgustingly long ad, wherein Midwest Micro went to war on a dozen different copywriting and typography principles.
Appearing in PC World’s August 1995 issue, there was not one but two illegible fonts (a Curlz MT copycat and another that seems Jester-adjacent). Both bad enough typefaces in their own right, made exponentially worse by mixing them together, along with inconsistent sizes and weights, often within a single word.
Even if the entire page was printed in Arial, it advertises nothing but…Clue: The boardgame? And badly, at that, considering the ad’s wordcount is higher than the intro in the game’s actual instructions.
Exactly zero words on this standalone first page (out of five!) mention the SoundBook II laptop, Home PC, or anything related to computer hardware. Even Midwest Micro’s ad patronizing the Egyptian Empire managed to explain everything in the first 50 words. In this ad, though? The product remains a mystery until page three.
Where page one was uneconomical enough to squander 20+ words explaining why Mr. Green isn’t included in this convoluted reference, page two blew its budget on more props and costumes than a JCPenney Portraits studio.
Colonel Mustard is holding a revolver like it’s a No. 2 pencil. Professor Plum is doing his best dime-store Batman villain. And on the right-side of this full-page spread, Miss Scarlet is dressed in the same color as the chair she’s sitting in, like a confused Demiguise.
A full seven paragraphs of puns and wordplay are wasted on disguising and muddying the SoundBook II’s specs, which could’ve fit into a single sentence: A 6lb laptop with a 75mhz Pentium (486) Processor, programmable Personal TouchPad, two RAM compartments (36mb minimum), floppy drive, and bays for “Personality Modules”* (e.g. CD-ROM drive or 14.4kbps voicemail fax modem).
[* This appears to be an unforgivable theft of the Sol-20’s much cooler Personality Modules, which were “a boot/bios/monitor (call it what you will) ROM on a tiny removable PC card…The intention was that you could change the "personality" of your machine by swapping in different boot ROMs. Each card contained up to 2 KB of EPROM.”]
Best of all, Midwest Micro manufactured exactly nothing! According to njroadfan at Vintage Computer Federation. “A lot of the ‘2nd tier’ clone makers of the 90s (think Midwest Micro) weren't much better than ‘almost’ no name PCs. They all used off the shelf parts and cases.” The Soundbook II, for example, was nothing more than an OEM rebrand of the Compal TS30C series–a bad notebook no matter whose name was on it.
PC Magazine’s Service & Reliability review in July 1995 railed against Midwest Micro, saying the company “ranked D, much worse than average. In fact, 45% of their laptops needed repair the first year!” I found one user complaint in comp.sys.laptops about ending up with five replacements in less than a year.
That didn’t stop Systemax Inc. (now the $1.4 billion Global Industrial Company) from acquiring Midwest Micro as part of a $48.3 million deal in 1997. A move that somehow still makes more sense than page three of this ad resolving nothing in this nonsense story and instead asking us to pivot to an alternate-universe version of this marketing-cum-murder.
Now it’s the Colonel reading Mr. Boddy’s demands that Mustard never reveal their…war crimes? God Midwest Micro is dabbling in dark themes to shill some silicon.
Attaching the monocle chain to his ear, lightens the mood somewhat. As does the Microsoft Bob box in the background. And those beige brick speakers are so burned into my childhood memories that I can’t look at them for more than a few seconds. Zoom in on the buttons next to the floppy drive and I swear they were drawn on top of the photo. Who knows! This ad isn’t exactly forthcoming with answers.
Page five reads like day five with dengue fever. Colonel Mustard is talking out loud to himself about lunch meat, code cracking in the Middle East, and Microsoft Golf. He never alters the will, becoming lured by a PC in another room, somehow.
And that’s it. There’s a 1-800 number to find out “who dun it.” But that number is different than Midwest Micro’s systems and peripherals sales lines. Presumably you’d be calling someone who manages further up the marketing funnel, someone sitting in the Fletcher, Ohio office that @EvanAnderson told Hacker News was “literally in the middle of farm fields. The founder sold out and eventually the business was owned by the same company who owned Tiger Direct.”
Systemax murdered Midwest Micro in 1997 with an acquisition.
Arguably more out of mercy than malice, though. Midwest Micro was objectively bad at marketing other companies’ products as their own.
Links to Resources:
PC World August 1995 via vintageapple.org
Midwest Micro homepage (1997) via Internet Archive
PC Computing February 1994 via Internet Archive
Compal TS30C specs via The MacDat Network
No-name PC clones via Vintage Computer Federation
Midwest Micro Archive via The Online Computer Buying Guide
Miami County loses computer manufacturing jobs via Dayton Daily News