Happy 15th Birthday, Annoying Banner Ads!

In 1994, Frank D’Angelo was working at an advertising firm called MVBMS, when his boss gave a corporate pep talk that would turn out to change the digital world.  He spoke of a “new media revolution.”  It would be enormous and fast, and if you missed the train on the coming innovations, you’d be left behind, just how it was with the Sedgway Revolution.  (Choral interlude: *Do you remember… early 2001?*)  I kid.  The internet is to the Sedgway what “is” is to “isn’t.”

Anyway, Frank was tasked with “jumpstarting the agency’s involvement in ‘cyberspace’” and making a “graphical ad unit” for a site called HotWired.com, which was then the cyber-incarnation of Wired magazine.

And so, fifteen years ago yesterday, banner ads were born, and we’ve been punching the crazed monkey ever since.  See if you can guess what the first six companies to advertise online were.  Plus, a picture of one of the first-ever banner ads, which is also one of the best-ever banner ads.  

The companies were MCI, Volvo, Club Med, 1-800-Collect, AT&T, and Zima.  Which just goes to show that sometimes, no matter how ahead of the advertising curve you are, your product is still the miscarried older sibling of Smirnoff Ice.  This part of D’Angelo’s account is also fascinating:

We were given the ad specs by HotWired and it was only then that we realized banners ads were clicked on and could drive consumers to a client designation on the web. Oops! This accidental lesson sparked us to develop websites for these initial ad banner placements. Some of our clients weren’t too sure they even wanted to “interact” with this new online population.

To be fair, there were only 2 million Americans online, and the 1994 internet was basically real life’s penal colony for weirdos to start a new, unpersecuted life of weirdo-ness.  See, this was AT&T’s very first idea of how web advertising should look:

Ha!  So ominous.  ”YOU WILL!”  Why did they ever even change it?  They got banner ads right on the first try.

The whole story at Ad Age.