Happy Birthday, Digital Advertising!
The Banner Campaign that Started a $24 billion Business, and Got a 78% Click-through Rate
Oct. 27 marks the 15th anniversary of the industry's first banner display ads, which appeared on Hotwired.com. To the many of you reading this who weren't in the business back then, that's not a typo; I'm not referring to www.HotWire.com, the travel site, but HotWired -- the first commercial digital magazine on the web and the offshoot of Wired magazine.
My boss and mentor Bob Schmetterer, president of Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer (MVBMS), a unit of Euro RSCG, was in that audience and he was totally energized by Artzt's challenge. It's important to note that our largest account at the time was MCI, which employed Vinton Cerf -- the "Father of the Internet" -- as VP-data services.
At the time I was an MCI account guy and Bob assigned me to this new media and created a deadline in order to jumpstart the agency's involvement in "cyberspace." Our challenge seemed simple: develop something called a "graphical ad unit" for HotWired. This initial assignment was under the guise of "let's explore this new medium and see what happens."
HotWired was the first commercial web 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 (professional) lives.
Its launch in 1994 was not without debate internally as to whether the ad units offered to the advertiser community should be simple text links or graphical ad banner units. Graphical ad display banners won out and the rest is history. And take a look at the hilarious come-on AT&T used to generate a click-through: "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? You will!"
The reaction ran from enthusiastic to somewhat leery. MCI, as one would expect, was truly supportive of our proactive initiative. Their corporate culture encouraged exploration. Volvo, on the other hand, understood the value of our experimenting with the new medium, but did not want to push/urge any interaction with the consumer. They didn't know what to expect, did not know how to handle responses and was concerned legal implications were involved. As a result, you see the first Volvo ad banner was nothing more than the Volvo logo and photo of an auto. No call to action or direction to click was to be incorporated into the Volvo banner. In fact, if someone clicked on that banner in October of 1994, it would take them to a simple questionnaire that could be emailed by the consumer on what kind of Volvo they might be interested in.
Research suggests we have a long road ahead in terms of measurement -- and I don't disagree; however, I'm not convinced we're that far off. I don't believe there will ever be a "silver bullet" to solve all of our problems, as our industry is constantly evolving, becoming more complex and proving to be a moving target. But all that said, from what we have learned through the use of fundamental building blocks of acquired knowledge, industry and case studies, the use of traditional media metrics, the use of existing best measurement practices for digital and a quest to continually "test and learn," we will ultimately be successful.
Has any one item in our industry been encased with so much debate -- at times even disdain -- as to its true value, role and contribution to marketing communications from its inception in 1994 to this day? Yet the display banner is the impetus to the creation of the online advertising category that will reach beyond $24 billion in 2009, according to eMarketer. Perhaps more important, no other development since has advanced advertising measurement, effectiveness and accountability than the display banner.
So on Oct. 27, I hope you will join me in toasting the birthday of the banner display ad -- whether you are a "cup is half-empty" or "cup is half-full" type of person. Some days I love the business and others day... well, not so much... but I have to admit: it's been an unbelievable 15 years.
I leave you with a challenge... Can you guess the two-word copy from one of the original banner ads that generated 78% click-through rate? I look forward to your answers.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
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Frank D'Angelo is founder and partner of CL&S, New York. |
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Jeez it makes me feel like Mad Digital Men!
I hope you catch this comment.
Best, Michel Lent Schwartzman
http://www.hyperquake.com/blog/happy-birthday-banner-ads/
@Vickie_Smith
http://www.VickieSmith.com
Thanks. You are correct Bob's passion,vision and creative thinking has been the fundamental principles that has served us well since 1994. It was a wonderful time with developments and learning occurring at break neck speed...
BTWL you forgot to mention someone......Darlene :)
Over the sponsorship period The Auto Channel developed many firsts; the first banner rotation software(like the TV spots we were familiar with), the first live NASCAR driver to crew radio on the web, the first live webcast of an Indy 500; the first live video of a new car unveiling (the 1997 Jaguar XK8-Live from the Petersen Auto Museum in LA). The Auto Channel was the first web site with "Channel" in its name and URL, and the first web site to offer consumers a view of dealer invoice without charge.
You ad guys out there might want to read our Dick Westman obit; he was an ad guy with vision and the father of sponsored internet.
http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2004/10/26/263835.html
Interestingly, I work at Modem now, and there's definitely 'healthy debate' on who/what was truly the first banner ad.
Sean
http://db.tidbits.com/article/2995
TidBITS has covered the Apple and Macintosh world on the Internet continuously since April 1990, and we recently published our 1,000th weekly email issue, though our publishing model has of course expanded well beyond just email these days.
cheers... -Adam C. Engst, TidBITS publisher
Adam Boettiger, Digital Strategist
http://www.adamboettiger.com/
adam at adamboettiger dot com
Some sites were 450x55, 460x60.
Not sure how 468x60 was the winner, but it was. And that sure made life easier. thanks for the article.
Cheers/Otto TImmons
Thanks for the memories. Those were great times indeed. I was the founding ad director at HotWired from 1994 - 1999 and can add a few tidbits to this discussion.
•HotWired launched with 14 sponsors. In addition to the six already mentioned I recall seven other campaigns but am forgetting one.
•Here's a list of those I recall: IBM (from Ogilvy/NY), Metricom (client direct), Xircom (Chiat/SF), Internet Shopping Network (client direct), Sprint (JWT/SF), AT&T (client direct and separate from the Modem AT&T campaign which also went live 10/27/94), JBL speakers (client direct I believe).
•I think Sharon Katz placed IBM, Tara Lemme placed Xircom, Bill Rollinson placed ISN and Thom Campbell placed Sprint. And, of course, Steven Comfort placed the 4 MVBMS campaigns and GM O'Connell himself called me on the phone to order banners for Modem clients Zima and AT&T.
•On the sales side, Doug Weaver, Mitchell Kreuch and Bill Peck did a lot of the heavy lifting and were key to HotWired selling out of all ad inventory at launch.
•The first contract was signed on 4/15/1994 by the AT&T client direct. I can't recall his name now but I believe this was sold by Jane Metcalfe who co-founded WIRED with Louis Rossetto. Two AT&T campaigns ran on HotWired at launch.
•HotWired's banners were 476x60 at launch but were modified to 468x60 in late 1996 when the IAB published banner standards.
Thanks again, Frank, for remembering that special day 15 years ago.
-Rick Boyce
Hope the Utah Hotel was fun tonight. Cheers
Thanks for the shout out Otto. As I recall, Caleb Donaldson, our copy editor extraordinaire was the one who pulled the all-nighter with me.
There are many others who deserve recognition from those early days of online advertising: Jonathan Steuer (online tsar -- the first visionary for HotWired), Andrew Anker (president), Barbara Kuhr (design director), Chip Bayer (editor in chief) and Howard Rheingold (first editor in chief), as well as Jonathan Nelson, co-founder of Organic with Brian and me, not to mention my brother and now CEO of Omnicom Digital.
http://adland.tv/content/banner-ads-tenth-birthday
www.primaryimpact.com/DPAC4
www.primaryimpact.com/DPAC4
There is one person in particular and three Wired West Coast sales people who have been overlooked in the stories over the past 15 years re; HotWired and selling the first digital publishing product/biz model. Dana Lyon was Wired's National Director of Sales who hired me, Ruth Tooker, Julie Nester, Jeanie Trautman, (the West Coast sales team), Doug Weaver, Mitchell Kreuch and the talented Rick Boyce. Dana was very instrumental to the success of Hotwired's launch and Ruth, Julie and Jeannie helped in a big way to set up and assist with numerous HW sales calls.
So how did this whole HotWired thing get started on the ad banner sales side? A fun story for the history books. Dana hired me as the West Coast Ad Sales Director to support the West Coast sales team to sell ads in Wired magazine. Dana and I shared 15'X15', maybe. office in San Francisco. Never forget-you could see between the mortar of the bricks to outside and no air conditioning. Wired was located in the original building where Rolling Stone magazine was produced and launched (I was told).
On one particular day Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf called Dana and I into their office and said we have something to show you. It was a slimmed down demo of HotWired with a couple of banner ads. They were selling us on more than HotWired, they were selling their vision of the future of digital publishing. Bottom line.....the business model is ad banners and we want you to sell them. So off we went scratching our heads wondering how we were going to fit this on our already full plate.
It turned into a race, a challenge of sorts, between Dana, me and my West Coast sales team, Louis, and Jane to see who could close the first ad banner. Dana and our team hit the West Coast hard for weeks- consumer and technology clients and their agencies-. Louis and Jane were making an impact in the East. We met with Sprint, Levi, Microsoft, Saturn, Intel, you name it. Bottom line- No signed insertion orders. Dana seemed inches from a deal.
Louis souped up the HotWired demo (complete with the Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile embedded video...ah ha you tube) and asked me to hop on a plane to head East to New York. Doug Weaver had just opened the NY Wired office and hired Mitchell Kreuch. So the 3 guys hit the streets of NY for two days. MVBMS clients MCI and Club Med were the first calls. The MCI meeting had about 20+ in the meeting, client and agency decision makers. The demo crashed 2-3 times. Steven Comfort, the visionary who clearly understood the benefits of this new medium, helped us make it through the meeting then introduced us to the President of Club Med.
To be continued (hit the word limit:-)
The next week in SF Dana's deals were baking. Other West Coast deals are in the oven but nothing is baked, East Coast too. Hmmmm who is going to get this done? Sure enough-Rick is correct- on Weds. or Thurs. of that week Jane Metcalf closed the first banner ad. That is a "signed insertion order" in hand. Many deals were baking but Jane wrapped it up. OK we were excited-and all a bit jealous too;-).
The next week or two Dana said she found a product champion for HotWired when she was just on an agency meeting. She said we really need this guy. Dana and I were running around like chickens with our heads cut off and planning a move to the new Wired office. That guy was-everyones favorite- Rick Boyce/Hal Riney. Dana even went so far as to take Rick and his wife out for dinner to close his wife first;-). Nice job Dana.
So the rest is history. Rick pulled it all together and made HotWired a success. The whole Wired/HotWired team made a ton of sales calls, many of them made in the new SF HotWired office with Andrew Anker's team (Howard Rheingold in cool shoes and all). Some Wired sales folks got their signed IO's some did not. And of course HotWired could have never been possible without Jonathon Nelson and the creative Organic team.
Thanks to all the clients and agencies that jumped on board at launch. And a big thanks to Dana Lyon for her endless stream of energy, hard work, long hours, and hiring all of us in the first place. Thanks Dana-Trust you are well.
Cheers,
Bill
Funny thing is your article centers around the nascent Internet In the spring and summer of 1994, we were also executing so-called banners (the term ad banner didn't exist at that time) for clients to be placed on America Online, Bloomberg, Prodigy and Compuserve. Executing creative for these online services was a challenge, and that is an understatement (think 4 bit color). When Mosaic took off in the early part of 1994, it was liberating from a creative perspective to say the least.
One other fact that may embellish your story, Razorfish was the first to do an animated gif. Where would ad banners be without the lowly animated gif? Remember the blue ball. Back then turning a graphic on and off or moving it was a technical feat!
One other note, in the fall and winter of 1994/1995, K2 Design also landed up a significant client: MCI. K2 created the identity and developed the entire "marketplaceMCI" website and contracted with MCI to build about a dozen or so web storefronts for their telecom clients who wished to be hosted with MCI.
Nice story. Brought back a lot of memories about silicon alley and the excitement surrounding that moment in time.
Douglas Cleek
Magnitude 9.6
While Rick Boyce was leading the charge as Hot Wired's VP of Sales, the Wired Magazine Sales Team was his "rep firm" and we sold (and often just did a fair catch) on the first Hot Wired sponsorships. I was the advertising director on the east coast and Bill Peck was the advertising director on the west coast. Frank D'Angelo and Steven Comfort, both then at Messner, were the most powerful advocates for the site and the idea among their clients. Steven was so good at "selling" Wired and Hot Wired to his clients that we subsequently hired him to sell for Wired.
When we began I had one sales person in the east, Mitchell Kreuch, now a VP at MySpace. Mitchell and I interacted with the east coast clients and agencies who were in that first wave. Volvo, Network MCI (Gramercy Press), Club Med and 1-800-Collect (All Messner); IBM (Ogilvy); Two AT&T campaigns (NW Ayer cut the first deal and Modem bought for a separate division as well)and Zima (also Modem). I would like to tell you how visionary we all were and the intricate sales process we went through, but that would be fabrication. We were excited about it and took our little demo (running locally on an old Mosaic browser) to lots of clients and agencies, but really it was a few risk takers and visionaries at the agencies and clients who made the calls.
Interesting tidbits. There was no such thing as an analytic program (no Omniture) at that time, much less anything like an ad server (Net Gravity was still 15 months away from launching). When clients would ask what they got for their money, we told them "a month. you get to be on the site for a month." Pricing was $15,000 a month. Why? because that's what we charged for a page in the magazine at the time.
What all of us on the team remember with varying degrees of fondness is that the site that launched on 10/27/94 bore very little resemblance to the demo we'd taken out. Volvo sponsored a "digital travelogue" called "On the Road." By the time of launch that had morphed into a "visit to the counterculture." Frank, I was the one who took the beating at Messner over that one. It remains a great cocktail party story!
I miss those time and I miss you all. Happy birthday.
Months after the successful launch of HotWired and Rick Boyce had taken the controls we found ourselves back in print selling Wired magazine. Unfortunately my love was with my last exciting date and not my old one. I lost my 14 plus year career interest in selling paper, and it showed. Time for me to go. After all some guy who created something called a search engine was calling. Infoseek.
The 468X60 banner was created during my first week at Infoseek in a team meeting with then Director of Marketing, Zara Haimo, (who btw was responsible for introducing the search technology to Infoseek-Sun Microsystems did not want it;-))
and the Infoseek engineering team members Andy Bensky and Eddie Kessler.
The size was determined by my wanting the whole page for the ad banner;-) and what was a reasonable size for the Infoseek product. We wanted something bigger then what was currently in the market, which by the way was very small on the search engine front, no Yahoo, no Architext/Excite, no Google, Webcrawler and Lycos were scratching the surface.
We launched an online media kit-the first-in early 1995 introducing the industries first cpm buys, 1 million impressions (yes impressions) for $15,000, half million for $10,000, and $7500 for 250,000 impressions. "keyword" buys were also introduce. And the 468X60 banner!!!!.
btw: first keywords requested Christmas, Chocolate, hmmm 3 others by Eric Lundberg, founder of AddRev in CA,.
Infoseeks cpm model was a huge success. We closed numerous advertisers and the impossible deal-Microsoft!!!!. Dave Yoder, famed SF Media Director at Anderson Lembke, signed on. After all Dave was not a guy who would buy an ad banner with no strings attached. Now that I think about it, Dave was in a big way responsible for pushing the 468X60 banner size because that was what A&L determined the artwork size would be for MS. Note: Dave also wanted "weekly" click through reports every Friday. Holy Cow.
So the size was established and basically standardized well before the IAB was even formed. However, there were still many banner sizes floating around in the market. The IAB standardized on the most popular size smartly because it was killing the ad agencies creative departments and overall helped grow an ad agencies choices of where to place ads, which ultimately grew the ad banner revenue stream. The down side-took creative ideas for banners off the self.
So this Halloween, please toast 468X60.