25 years of the Commercial Internet
Part 3. The Advertising Years 2000-2005
There was a lot of coin to be made if you were dealing in digital advertising between 2000 and 2005. And even though the fledgling digital department was a ghetto within the mass advertising agency, three profitable advertising platforms were established and able to emerge during this period in a big way:
• Banner ads or OLAs (On Line Advertising) echoed print and television ads as the creative departments in ad agencies laboured (painfully) to “integrate” their creative messages.
• Microsites were sold as immersive brand “experiences” that helped consumers have an “emotional connection” with a brand.
• E-mail, born out of the CRM direct marketing world, promised (though rarely delivered) one-to-one communications from brands to “loyal” customers.
I spent most of this era at MacLAREN McCANN as the Digital Group Creative Director on Pontiac, Buick, GMC and Coke. Even with the small economic downturn known as the “dot-com bubble” ( a blip by today’s standard), hundreds of millions of dollars poured into these quick-hit “campaign” programs. The object of the game was to catch people where they were starting to spend more and more of their time – online.
I don’t have a lot of insight on this era because I don’t find it a particularly insightful time. It felt like the mass commercialization of the web was somehow ruining it. Despite our best efforts, much of the work from this era didn’t seem all that persuasive, informative or credible. It was labourious to build, hard to maintain and expensive to promote. I remember a client once said to me, “Why is this internet stuff is taking up 20% of my budget and 80% of my time?”
A handful of memorable programs come to mind. Subservient Chicken ruffled a lot of feathers, and BMWFilms.com turned a lot of heads. But both programs relied on huge investments in media for promotion. The notion of spending money on an ad, to drive somebody to what is esentially an ad, never sat well with me.
I found the most interesting stuff wasn’t happening in a commercial space, it was happening in outerspace.
NASA’s ClickWorkers
NASA’s ClickWorkers was one of my favorite programs of this era. Millions of images from the Mars survey missions needed mapping. The amount of time it would take NASA staff to map each crater hole was, well, astronomical. The solution? Raw images of Martian landscapes were posted to the web and many volunteers like you and me clicked around the edges of the craters to map them. Perhaps NASA could have written software to accomplish this feat but I’m glad they didn’t. I must have done a thousand images before I got tired.
clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov circa 2001
Having the opportunity to look at photos seen by only five or so other human beings on the planet connected me with NASA like never before. Although I’m sure that NASA marketing or brand managers had no play in the decision to mobilize this program, it left a brand impression on me that I will never forget. It also introduced me to the concept of crowdsourcing and it set the bar for meaningful online brand experiences.
A New Generation of Websites
Bubbling just below the advertising world’s adoption of the web were platforms like Blogger.com (1999), wikipedia.com (2001), WordPress.com, Typepad.com, LinkedIn and MySpace (all in 2003), and Facebook and Flickr (both in 2004). Quietly gathering force, these offerings would change the nature of the game again, paving the way to the next generation of the web.
Check back again for the next post in “The first 25 years of the Commercial Web” series: 2005-2010 Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
25 years of the Commercial Internet 1990-2015
1990-1995 – The Brochureware Years
1995-2000 – The e-Commerce Years
2000-2005 – The Advertising Years
2005-2010 – Web 2.0 and The Social Media Years
2010-2015 – The Remix Years
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August 18th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
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