You Will

"You Will" was the name of an AT&T marketing campaign from the early 1990s, directed by David Fincher. Each ad presented a futuristic scenario, over which the voice of Tom Selleck narrated, beginning with "Have you ever..." and ending with "You will. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T". While some of the innovations promised by the ads have materialized, ironically few of them were actually influenced by AT&T.

Innovations

The proposed innovations included:
*Telemedicine
*Grocery self checkout machines that would process an entire cart at a time without the groceries needing to be removed, presumably via RFID or something similar ("Have you ever checked out at the supermarket, a whole cart at a time?")
*A Software agent ("Have you ever had an assistant who lived in your computer?")
*Teleconferencing ("Have you ever shown up for a meeting in your bare feet?")
*A GPS navigation system with real-time traffic data ("Have you ever crossed the country without stopping to ask directions?")
*Wifi/WAN ("Have you ever sent a fax from the beach?")
*Wristwatch cell phones ("...Or gotten a phone call, on your wrist?")
*Some sort of personal information consolidation ("Have you ever renewed your drivers license at an ATM?")
*Real-time online collaboration, envisioned as two students teaching each other their native languages over videophone ("Have you ever studied with a classmate thousands of miles away?") and, in a separate ad, as a father reading a bed-time story to his child remotely, while they both view the same page of the story on their individual laptops.

References

* [http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008008.html RussellBeattie.com]
* [http://www.kmf.org/maydak/attbookbeta.html The Wrong Choice]

External links

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8 series of four ads on youtube]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVplomwqPic another ad on youtube]
* [http://commercial-archive.com/node/114815 six of the ads from commercial-archive.com] (membership required to watch)