Happy Birthday Online Advertising!

The Banner Campaign that Started a $24 billion Business

Excerpt from an article posted by Frank D'Angelo on 10.26.09 in Advertising Age,

We have come a long way baby.

Oct. 27 marks the 15th anniversary of the advertising industry's first foray into the digital age. Online banner display ads, first appeared in the age of dialup internet access on Hotwired.com. To the many of you reading this who weren't in the business back then, HotWired was the first commercial digital magazine on the web and the offshoot of Wired magazine. 

HotWired was the first online magazine to attract blue chip corporate sponsorships dollars on the web. The site launched shortly before Netscape's browser, and the advent of such other new media such as Pathfinder.com (Time Inc.'s commercial web content offering) and Cnet.com.

Once the media commitment to HotWired was made, we needed to select clients we believed would share our excitement in entering this new space. We went through the client list and quickly reasoned that MCI (telecom), Volvo (automotive) and ClubMed (travel/hospitality) would be as good a core of candidates for this exploration as any. 

Four of our then-clients placed ad banners as part of that first campaign, MCI, Volvo, Club Med and 1-800-Collect. (The other two advertisers were AT&T and Zima.) Keep in mind, this was 1994; the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was less than a year old (soon to be replaced by Netscape Explorer), and Web access? Purely dial-up, 24.4kps if you were lucky, meaning these ads took a while to load. The online U.S. population? Two million, if that. 

These "original six" were the first brands to take a leap of faith and place advertising in the unchartered "cyberspace" territory. But several didn't know they were taking it until after the fact. Corporate America was still largely unfamiliar with the graphical web, so we didn't even try to sell the concept. We decided to commit agency media and development dollars to place client banner ads on HotWired without clients' prior consent or knowledge. The way he saw it was if they liked it, they would be happy to pay us and if not, that was OK too; but at least the agency would get a running start at exploring this new exciting medium that was on course to change all of our lives.

To read the rest of Frank's article in Advertising age...

Can you explain that for me one more time please?

If there is one lesson I have learned the hard way throughout all of 2009, is that our world and our lives have become increasing more complex and continues to become more and more so with each new day. We are continuously bombarded with new problems, more questions and more choices as we are confronted with new products, services, more ideas and concepts that will confuse the majority of us. All of this adds to the complexity of and compounds what confused us in 2008 and years before that.

I am convinced that the rise of all this complexity is partially a result of us not being able to say no, to always being attracted by the newest of the new, to always being distracted by all of the things society tells us we need to have, but in the end it does not matter. When life gets this crazy, we need a solution to back down from the insanity somehow and reclaim our lives from the turmoil it creates.

All of this complexity is creating new demand for a whole new range of new kinds of services. Individuals and organizations will find business models in helping people deal with the complexity. The biggest opportunity I can see is for people who are really good at explaining - at breaking down of complex subject matter and putting it into terms that the rest of us can understand. There is a huge oppportunity for people and organizations that can take a complex idea, distill it down to its common denominators and re-package it so that a maximum number of people can understand and act on it.

Many of our clients develop and market sophisticated products or technologies, developed by engineers and other geniuses, or sell services that are intangible and are really difficult to explain in everyday terms. Often this results in a disconnect between the customer and the product or the service offering of the organization, even though the product or service might just be the best thing since sliced bread and an excellent match.

At FRANK, we specialize in taking complex problems, ideas and solutions and explain them in clear and concise ways that resonate with your clients. Most of the time, we use words, but we also employ clean, modern and progressive design, Flash animation, custom photography audio and video or a combination of these to help us help you make your message be better understood. We would also like to help you be better at your job.

Contact FRANK today to see how we can help you stand out and be heard above the noise. Heck, we are not shy, there are others who can help you explain yourself in innovative ways too. We don't mind passing these along to you because every client has unique needs and you just might need a unique solution.

Below are some more clever companies and individuals, mostly in the US. Expert explainers who we think will be making a real contribution towards making the world just a little less complicated in the years to come.

Read on...