(FORTUNE Magazine) – So you wanted a vision? You got it--all of it. IBM's chairman and CEO, Lou Gerstner, is taking his vision to the streets in a $200 million-plus marketing and ad campaign that had its debut recently with eight-page advertising inserts in a dozen major newspapers across the country. The giant ads spell out the future Gerstner would like to see not only for IBM but for the world of business. E-business, that is: wiring your company to all its major constituencies--customers, employees, vendors, and suppliers--by intranets, by extranets, or over the Web. The ads (which also include flashier TV and magazine versions) clearly try to position IBM as the company best equipped to take businesses into that brave new world, with all the requisite hardware and software, brains and brawn.

Indeed, in its sprawling newsprint ads, brawny IBM beats the reader over the head with declarations of its e-business prowess, from helping Charles Schwab and Fidelity sell securities on the net to enabling a major airline to sell tickets online. Ad agency Ogilvy & Mather has turned Big Blue into Great Gray here, with a sea of text that explains e-business's opportunities and headaches, and suggests how to get started in cyberbusiness. You guessed it: call IBM.

Clearly, IBM would like to be to E-business what Kleenex is to tissues, and this ad campaign is Lou Gerstner's manifesto. He's been trumpeting the virtues of electronic business in meetings with fellow CEOs and in speeches to industry gatherings for some time; now he's taking it to the masses. The advertising is effectively aimed at Everybusinessman, from the FORTUNE 500 to the startup, from the risk-averse 50-something middle manager to the frustrated Gen Xer. But in particular, it is also skewed toward small and medium-sized businesses, which may have thought IBM was out of their league and which also, some believe, provide the greatest e-business growth opportunity for IBM in the near term as big business slowly warms up to the idea.

Will massively texty ads work in this megabyte age? Some advertising executives feel IBM might actually have gone out of its way to make the whole thing look unslick in order to convey honesty and anti-hype. There will be lots of people who won't read it, but even then IBM will benefit from the "psychology of the peripheral cue," says David Aaker, author of Building Strong Brands. "They will figure if there are a lot of words here, there must be some substance."

Then there are those who will wade through. Laurel Cutler, vice chairman of Foote Cone & Belding, says she'll pass the ad on to a number of clients because "it has taken a subject that was terribly esoteric, about which everyone is uncomfortable, and explained it. This is not the arrogant, awesome IBM; this is a very helpful and supportive IBM."

Alan Brew, partner of branding consultants Addison Seefeld & Brew, however, says the saga ads are just too generic--too soup-to-nuts. "The message is blurred," he says. IBM has trademarked "e" inside a circle. So what? asks Brew. There are a lot of e-ads out there already.

Indeed, most of the online brands that jump to mind--Netscape, Yahoo!, AOL, E*Trade--belong to much more clearly defined goods, services, or applications. "This is like trying to brand 'telecommunications' or 'the information superhighway,' " says Satjiv S. Chahil, a marketing consultant who once headed global marketing and multimedia efforts at Apple Computer.

The fully wired world that IBM envisions dominating is still a long way off, even though electronic business is growing rapidly. In the U.S., internet trade of goods and services business-to-business is projected to grow to $105 billion by the year 2000 from $7.8 billion this year, according to Forrester Research, a technology research firm. But that's still a tiny portion--to 0.8% from 0.1% of the total pie, Forrester says. Jerry Michalski, managing editor of Release 1.0, a monthly newsletter about the future of computers and communication, predicts that e-business will eventually amount to 75% or 80% of GNP. "Over time, a portion of practically every transaction will touch the internet," he says.

"I don't think any one company is going to own e-commerce," says Brooks Fisher, VP in charge of the Web effort at Intuit. Adds Eric Koivisto, director of advertising for Microsoft: "A lot of companies share the desire to be the one people think of when they want to conduct commerce using the Web. Obviously we would like to be one of those." So far, IBM's the only one trying to do it with verbal tonnage.

--Betsy Morris