It was an exciting time. Ads were one way to collect scarce information on the state of the art.
If you hoped to make money in the microcomputer field, as I did, you learned a lot: what corporate purchasers were thinking about, what consumer trends were happening, which companies were successful enough to pay for full-page ads over a period of months, and indirectly what systems were selling because of third-party ads.
If you were making the buying decision for yourself on what would be the equivalent of about $10,000 with of equipment, all market signals were worth observing. It was one thing for Apple to spend a lot on Apple ][ ads, but it was something else entirely to see how quickly the notion of IBM PC compatibility was featured in software or accessories by companies that weren't IBM.
I purchased some magazines 50% because of their ads and 50% for editorial; in the case of PC Shopper, a tabloid-size magazine that could be 600-800 pages, perhaps 70% because of ads, 30% editorial.
The meta perspective was fun too: no one really knew the best ways to advertise so there were many different approaches early on. Games had extremely fanciful cover art that had zero to do with the actual rendered graphics. Infocom's ads for their popular text-only ads were, duh, all text and had extraordinarily good copy. Ads for database managers ended up being DBMS tutorials that too often ended up mentioning recipes. Obviously I never saw an Apple or IBM or Commodore machine hoisted up on someone's kitchen counter, recipe opened, IRL.
It wasn't always creative or interesting though. Even 40 years ago my friend and I were making fun of endless pictures showing two white people in front of a monitor, with one pointing at it and the other trying to look excitedly at 80-column text or a 4-color pie chart in 320x200 resolution.
If you hoped to make money in the microcomputer field, as I did, you learned a lot: what corporate purchasers were thinking about, what consumer trends were happening, which companies were successful enough to pay for full-page ads over a period of months, and indirectly what systems were selling because of third-party ads.
If you were making the buying decision for yourself on what would be the equivalent of about $10,000 with of equipment, all market signals were worth observing. It was one thing for Apple to spend a lot on Apple ][ ads, but it was something else entirely to see how quickly the notion of IBM PC compatibility was featured in software or accessories by companies that weren't IBM.
I purchased some magazines 50% because of their ads and 50% for editorial; in the case of PC Shopper, a tabloid-size magazine that could be 600-800 pages, perhaps 70% because of ads, 30% editorial.
The meta perspective was fun too: no one really knew the best ways to advertise so there were many different approaches early on. Games had extremely fanciful cover art that had zero to do with the actual rendered graphics. Infocom's ads for their popular text-only ads were, duh, all text and had extraordinarily good copy. Ads for database managers ended up being DBMS tutorials that too often ended up mentioning recipes. Obviously I never saw an Apple or IBM or Commodore machine hoisted up on someone's kitchen counter, recipe opened, IRL.
It wasn't always creative or interesting though. Even 40 years ago my friend and I were making fun of endless pictures showing two white people in front of a monitor, with one pointing at it and the other trying to look excitedly at 80-column text or a 4-color pie chart in 320x200 resolution.