Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Everybody remembers the catchphrase. Almost nobody remembers that it did not exist at the start. Dell's agency Lowe Worldwide built the Steven character first, and the line that made him famous only turned up in his fourth commercial, after DDB in Chicago picked up the account. Before that he was just a kid in a store talking about computers.
Ben Curtis landed the part in December 2000. He was on an acting scholarship at NYU, the casting call was after someone between twelve and seventeen, and he was two years past the limit. By his own telling he was the only person at the audition who did not bring his mother along. He got it anyway, and inside a couple of years he was one of the most recognizable faces on American television.
Look at what he is actually selling here, though. A Dimension L Series with an Intel Pentium III processor and six months of America Online, seven hundred and ninety nine dollars. Beige tower, CRT monitor, a pair of desktop speakers. Free shipping, three to five day ground. And a phone number on screen, because in 2001 plenty of people still bought a computer by calling one.
The campaign did exactly what Dell needed it to. Reporting from the period credits it with roughly doubling the company's sales while its market share climbed hard, and it dragged Dell from being a mail order box shifter into a brand people said out loud. Steven ran from 2000 to 2003, after which Dell switched to a campaign built around a group of interns instead.
There is a version of the ending everyone repeats, which is that Curtis lost the gig over a 2003 marijuana arrest. The timeline is messier than that. Press coverage in 2002 already had Steven being moved aside, and the intern spots were on air before the arrest happened. Curtis has spoken about all of it openly since, and in a 2013 interview he argued Dell should just bring the character back. Did you have one of these beige towers humming away in your house?
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#delldude #dell #dellcommercial #dimensionlseries #pentium3 #aol #americaonline #2000snostalgia #retrotech #vintagecomputing #y2k #retrocommercial #earlyinternet #techhistory #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
Everybody remembers the catchphrase. Almost nobody remembers that it did not exist at the start. Dell's agency Lowe Worldwide built the Steven character first, and the line that made him famous only turned up in his fourth commercial, after DDB in Chicago picked up the account. Before that he was just a kid in a store talking about computers.
Ben Curtis landed the part in December 2000. He was on an acting scholarship at NYU, the casting call was after someone between twelve and seventeen, and he was two years past the limit. By his own telling he was the only person at the audition who did not bring his mother along. He got it anyway, and inside a couple of years he was one of the most recognizable faces on American television.
Look at what he is actually selling here, though. A Dimension L Series with an Intel Pentium III processor and six months of America Online, seven hundred and ninety nine dollars. Beige tower, CRT monitor, a pair of desktop speakers. Free shipping, three to five day ground. And a phone number on screen, because in 2001 plenty of people still bought a computer by calling one.
The campaign did exactly what Dell needed it to. Reporting from the period credits it with roughly doubling the company's sales while its market share climbed hard, and it dragged Dell from being a mail order box shifter into a brand people said out loud. Steven ran from 2000 to 2003, after which Dell switched to a campaign built around a group of interns instead.
There is a version of the ending everyone repeats, which is that Curtis lost the gig over a 2003 marijuana arrest. The timeline is messier than that. Press coverage in 2002 already had Steven being moved aside, and the intern spots were on air before the arrest happened. Curtis has spoken about all of it openly since, and in a 2013 interview he argued Dell should just bring the character back. Did you have one of these beige towers humming away in your house?
Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#delldude #dell #dellcommercial #dimensionlseries #pentium3 #aol #americaonline #2000snostalgia #retrotech #vintagecomputing #y2k #retrocommercial #earlyinternet #techhistory #gameforestgf #youtubeshorts #gaming
