America 1982-Chapter 606 - 135: Facing the Future

Winton Sev’s advertising design abilities, which Tommy praised, weren’t without basis. In fact, in 1982, Winton Sev happened to participate in a TV advertisement brainstorming session for MCI due to a fortunate coincidence combined with boredom.

He was just looking to relax his brain by flipping through the latest comic book in the MCI break room after work, and he overheard a few MCI executives discussing their work even during their break, debating what kind of commercial they should produce to achieve an effect similar to that of the TV advertisement AT&T had released the previous year.

In 1981, AT&T had produced a TV commercial that was comparable in quality to a short film, filled with humanistic care. Once it was released, the market share for long-distance calls grew by 5%, leading many telecommunication providers to imitate the move, hoping to replicate that success.

Having seen that classic advertisement by AT&T, which was essentially a story about a mother-son relationship, Winton Sev thought it was entirely useless. A son in a distant land calls his mother back home, tearfully expressing concern throughout the call while the mother asks softly, their exquisite acting seemed moving indeed. The climax of the ad was when the mother asked why the son kept choking up on the call, to which the son replied, "It’s just because I love you." The commercial ended with the simple voice-over: AT&T, for just 70 cents, let love traverse thousands of miles. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

As a straightforward science guy, Winton Sev had always found this commercial frivolous. His hometown was New Haven, Connecticut, but he was now living on the other end of America in California, making long-distance calls to his parents often. No one knew better than him what it felt like to chat with family over long-distance calls and whether the conversations would be choked with emotion and full of warmth.

So, in the break room, he told those colleagues, who were endlessly singing praises of the AT&T advert, that it could only deceive those who rarely used long-distance calls with its so-called humanistic care and was unable to resonate emotionally with frequent users.

Then he demonstrated to his colleagues what a real long-distance mother-son phone conversation was like by calling his own mom.

"Winton~ what do you want, calling back like this?!!!" The woman’s voice from the speakerphone was so loud it echoed throughout the break room.

Winton replied in a volume scarcely lower than his mother’s, "Mom! I’m wearing a hearing aid! You don’t have to shout! You scared all my colleagues! Keep it down! I can hear you clearly!"

"That’s good! Hang up then! Long-distance calls are too expensive! Write if there’s something important!" His mother, a professor on the other side of America, roared then abruptly hung up the phone.

After demonstrating, the professor looked at his colleagues, "Do you think any mother, like in the advertisement, could talk with her son so tenderly for three minutes, allowing her son to spend most of the time choking up? If I were to make a TV commercial for MCI, I’d simply hire the actors from the AT&T commercial and reshoot the same mother-son interaction, just with the son’s final line changed. When the mother asks why he’s crying, the son would tell her: ’Because AT&T’s long-distance charges are too expensive.’

"Finally, I’d replace the voice-over with: MCI, the cost of letting love traverse thousands of miles, as low as 50 cents per minute."

He thought nothing of his words at the time, simply a casual chat to relax, then went back to continue his coffee and comics. However, MCI executives privately discussed his proposal and found it very good. A few days later, they approached Winton Sev again, asking him to repeat his last two sentences from that day to confirm they were his original thoughts because they wanted to use them in the commercial.

It was then that Winton found out that these guys had contacted the production company and brought back the actors who played the mother and son for AT&T to reshoot an MCI version of the call. The audience watched the AT&T version, thinking it was a sentimental film that reminded them of love’s ability to cross thousands of miles.

The MCI version, however, turned out to be an even more effective comedy, ending with the two lines that Winton Sev had come up with.

When aired, the audience initially thought they were watching a replay of the classic commercial until the twist in the final line revealed it was a new ad from the long-distance phone service provider MCI, and they easily remembered the message: AT&T’s long-distance charges were too expensive, while MCI cost only 50 cents per minute.

The year the ad went live, MCI’s market share for long-distance calls grew by 6%, and along with AT&T’s, it became one of the two long-distance phone adverts from that era that American viewers remembered. Many in the advertising industry praised its ingenious concept, comparable to the classic ad wars between Pepsi and Coke.

Afterward, MCI Chairman McGowan personally bought every game console and game on the market and delivered them to Professor Winton Sev to thank him for the brilliant advertising idea he provided to MCI.

Tommy understood his professor’s interests; it wasn’t about being fully committed to designing ads for others, but rather treating it as a game to relax and switch mental gears. He particularly enjoyed these strokes of inspiration and had mentioned in class many times that as the software industry boomed and the internet became widespread, there would be more and more incidents like his casual suggestion for MCI’s successful campaign. Because the internet would enable many people around the world to witness the extraordinary within an ordinary person through random bursts of brilliance—this is the charm of the internet, breaking down distance and space, telling the world about your extraordinariness.