How Gateway 2000's Cow-Spotted Ads Went From Charming to Cringe

A retrospective on Gateway 2000’s magazine advertising traces the PC maker’s shift from scrappy, self-aware marketing to bloated corporate spectacle across the mid-1990s. Under founder Ted Waitt — a jeans-and-no-socks South Dakotan who drove a Porsche and owned a single ill-fitting suit — the company ran sprawling 8-to-26-page inserts in outlets like Byte, PC Magazine, and Computer Shopper, stuffed with barnyard puns, party-hatted animals, and loosely connected soap-opera vignettes. The gimmicks drew scorn from marketing professionals but coincided with explosive growth: a 1993 IPO at $15 a share, revenues climbing from $1 billion to $3.7 billion by 1995, and Waitt becoming one of America’s first tech billionaires.

The piece frames these ads as ‘peak Bad Tech Ads,’ where clever pastiche gradually curdled into self-indulgence — culminating in productions like ‘Agent 2000,’ starring Waitt himself amid props reportedly pulled from his own garage. Behind the camp, the company was contending with mounting customer-service complaints, leaning heavily on repeat buyers and referrals (over half its business, per an SEC filing) while pouring money into doubled support staff, tripled warranties, and 24-hour phone lines to shore up a base that market research showed most buyers still barely recognized.

The narrative ends on the company’s decline: Gateway launched its first website and opened suburban retail stores in 1996, fumbled the discontinued Destination 2000 PC/TV hybrid, then in 1997–98 abandoned its signature Holstein cow branding, acquired Amiga, and dropped ‘2000’ from its name in a bid to look more grown-up — marking the end of an era of gleefully campy computer marketing.