Did AT&T Predict the Future? The "You Will" Campaign 25 Years Later
In the early 90's, I remember an ad campaign from AT&T that predicted what we would be able to do in the future. It seemed wild and fantastical at the time, but that was the point. Because each ad ended with the line, "And the company that will bring it to you... AT&T."
It was a weird campaign in a way. They weren't selling anything specifically. In ad speak, that's known as a branding campaign - one that's not selling any product, but the company in general - but in this case, they seemed to be advertising for things that didn't exist yet.
But it worked. It made you think about the future, what kind of technology and lifestyle we could expect to lead, and it was fun to think about.
With 2018 officially here, I realized that the You Will campaign, which debuted in 1993, is now 25 years old. So I decided to look back at this little piece of pop culture and see just how close they came. Turns out... Pretty damn close.
And some of what they predicted we've already far surpassed.
Enjoy!
Here's a few compilations of the ads so you can watch them unbroken:
By the way, if you're wondering who the narrator's voice is - it's Tom Selleck. :)
(sorry for the terrible quality on this one)
And here's a take that Marques Brownlee made on the campaign a few years ago:
Very fun! I remember those commercials and they were pretty cool. It is pretty amazing what they got right. They just missed the whole internet on your cell phone thing so didn't extrapolate them out in the right way. Still really interesting to watch. Good work!
I hope, flexible screens will finally be a thing in couple of next years. But what will happen in next 25 years? Wow.. this is now very difficult to say.
I think... we will have a lot of automation. A video from CGP Grey is talking about exactly this topic:
And... I think we as a human kind need to figure out a different economy model, which will not be based on money. In my opinion in 25 years, we will all be gathering reputation (or reputation tokens, probably based on blockchain). But it will be something different like from those episodes of Black Mirror and The Orville.
What will be main difference? Multiple reputation tokens. Someone can be a total asshole, so he will have a little KindnessToken, but if he will be at the same time a brilliant mathematician, then he will have a lot MathToken. Our future economy in my opinion will be based on reputation.
This is a brilliant (and somewhat scary) video.
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STOPThis is rad man :O
Pretty incredible prerdictions (both good and terrible). I suppose there's so many predictions out there that you get all kinds of nonsense and brilliance and averages sout, but AT&T were definitely above average here!
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