Chapter 6Data and the Rise of Online Advertising
Worldwide spending on programmatic online display advertising will total more than $32 billion by 2017, according to a Magna Global forecast. As that figure shows, the display advertising format has grown immensely since its quiet debut when the first Internet banner ads ran two decades ago in 1994, according to Advertising Age.
These ads, which included banners from AT&T and Volvo, ran on Hotwired.com, the online version of Wired magazine. In his Ad Age column from 2009, “Happy Birthday, Digital Advertising,” Frank D'Angelo reflected on the 15th anniversary of the banner ad. He said that the advertising agency he was working for in 1994—Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer (MVBMS)/Euro RSCG—embarked on the project for some of its clients as an experiment. “Let's explore the new medium and see what happens” is how D'Angelo described MVBMS's approach.
In fact, the web was so new a medium that MVBMS didn't even inform its clients of its banner ad plans. MVBMS ran into some surprises along the way. The biggest was that the ads could double as a link that would bring customers to the advertiser's website. This unexpected revelation required creating websites for some clients that didn't have them yet.
The ads were primitive. Volvo's included just the company logo and a photo of a car. The AT&T ad had a prescient and now famous call to action: “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? You will.” According to D'Angelo, one ...
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