In 1993, AT&T launched its “You Will” ad campaign, which predicted future technological developments that seemed pretty far-fetched at the time. In hindsight, the ad was surprisingly accurate in anticipating technology that’s commonplace today. “Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away, crossed the country without stopping for directions, or sent someone a fax from the beach? You will, and the company that will bring it to you is AT&T,” said the first ad. Okay, the fax prediction was a bit off because that technology fell by the wayside after email was developed, but the sentiment was correct. The series of ads predicted grocery checkout machines that process an entire cart at a time, telemedicine, distance learning, smartwatches, and video on demand, to name a few. It wasn’t necessarily AT&T that made those advancements possible, but it does provide some of the infrastructure on which the world’s communications flow. The gadgets and software that brought these futuristic capabilities to consumers were created by a new generation of Silicon Valley companies that didn’t even exist when these ads were made.
