Richard Flynn :: no comment

YouTube - Cisco Systems - Are You Ready?

Cisco ran a series of these advertisements during the years 1998–2000:¹ they all ended with the phrase ‘Are you ready?’ repeated over and over. As far as I am aware, they were never broadcast on terrestrial TV in the UK: the only time I ever saw them was on Qantas in-flight entertainment. Evidently they had such an effect on me that whenever I hear someone say ‘Are you ready?’—even now—I think of Cisco. I searched the other day and found this video, and one other which was less evocative.

It’s interesting to compare the ‘facts’ as stated in the advertisement with the Internet and the Web as they exist today:

The Web has [sic] more users in its first five years | than telephone did in the first thirty.

Well, this ad was made more than five years after the Web was invented: depending on who you ask, we can put that event in 1990 or 1992. It could be that the child actor (who sounds like she’s speaking a southern-England variety of English) mispronounced the –d as –s, but perhaps from Cisco’s point of view the advertisement was made within the first five years of the Web: it was certainly made less than five years after the Web became commercially attractive.²

A population | the size of the United Kingdom | joins the Internet every six months.

It has been estimated that in 2007 the United Kingdom had a population of nearly 61 million. One source suggests that at the end of 2008 there were 1,574,313,184 users on the Internet from all over the world (1,574 million), whereas there had been 360,985,492 at the end of 2000. If we assume that growth has been consistent over those eight years (we can do nothing else), then there were 75,832,981 new users every six months over that eight-year period. So, the growth of the Internet hasn’t slowed since Cisco’s advertisement: if anything, the rate of growth has increased.

One day the Internet will make | long-distance calls | a thing of the past.

The phrase ‘long-distance calls’ here is shorthand for ‘paying higher rates to place calls outside my local area’, which is a particularly American phenomenon.³ Presumably they didn’t mean ‘going on the Internet will mean that you will no longer want to speak to people over a long distance because you’ll be so excited about what you can find on the Web and what you can accomplish using email.’ Well, it’s true: many people now make use of VoIP to place long-distance calls where they would previously have used the POTS. VoIP is hardly ubiquitous, though, especially in the consumer market, where it’s really only the affluent tech-savvy who are aware of, let alone use, services like Skype. I understand that many businesses and large enterprises are deploying VoIP systems now for their phone services; the biggest provider of enterprise VoIP hardware is Cisco. Hmm.

Something that always confused me about these ads is quite what it is that they’re advertising. The hardware implied in the voiceover at the end are high-end packet-routing switches, as used by Internet Service Providers. Did Cisco really expect executives ISPs and Internet Exchanges that weren’t already using Cisco hardware suddenly to purchase expensive new equipment on the strength of a slightly soppy ad campaign? I don’t believe it. Or were they trying to get their name more generally known? But to what end? Cisco still doesn’t market direct to consumers (their consumer brand of networking hardware is Linksys). Some might describe this as a prime example of corporate behaviour in the Web boom: all fur coat and no knickers, with no real purpose to the marketing.

I also have a strong suspicion that each of the child actors is a native English-speaker.