Day: 8 November 2017

History of Online Advertising

Thankfully, somebody is preserving the history of online advertising.

I’ve worked for a number of digital advertising companies. Many of these no longer exist: Engage, Accipiter, aiMatch and StickyADS.tv to name four. Three of these were bought and their legacy lives on with other companies. Engage moved on from the digital advertising world in 2002.

There’s a history of the internet – and more importantly of the way our media adapted to the rise of a connected digital world – buried in the history of those and many other companies that existed in the early days of the world wide web. Much of that history is probably lost. I think that’s a shame so, earlier today, it was really good to see Digiday publish an oral history of the first banner ad.

(Of note: I got the new Twitter 280 character option today so this was the first of my longer tweets)

In related nostalgia, I’ve been working in London 24 years today. I haven’t the time to write anything about that but I just discovered I did write about it in 2004 after 11 years in the city which is probably still relevant.

Curns’ Ad Links for 8 November 2010

A Box That Does It All

The MBEN’s job is to sort it out, handle it, deliver it, and to do so automatically. You don’t have to get a bunch of different little boxes to store and sort through things. It has an audio/video tuner, an amp, a hard drive, everything necessary for you to do the things you want to do.

Mobile phones and PDAs – something I try to talk about occasionally and not very well. It’s at times like this that I bow to somebody with superior writing and thought processing capabilities. Therefore, gentle reader my I present Lance Arthur: The MBEN Cometh. If you read these words of wisdom you’ll understand what I was trying to say.

Eleven Years In The Big Smoke

I’ve been in London eleven years now. Things have moved on a bit in that time.

Eleven years ago today I started my working life. It was my first post-university full-time job. I was a support engineer on a satellite audio network: the shifts seemed awful and the pay (at least in the first few years) not much better but I loved the job and the people. Many of those colleagues continue to be friends to this day although we haven’t worked together for seven and a half years. It also means that I have been living in London for eleven years, yesterday. I’ve been trying to locate things that have changed in that time. I live in a different place (but only the second place I’ve inhabited in London) and I’m on my 5th job. I don’t work the shifts anymore but, in many ways, miss them and the routine they gave you. I’m wi-fied, pda’d, multi-channeled and mobile (in the phone sense) where I wasn’t – which I guess means my money is being spent on more frivolous things.

London has changed that’s for sure. We have a Mayor and Congestion Charging. Docklands has grown beyond all recognition in the last eleven years; there are some new building on the skyline and the Southbank has been opened up considerably. Like Edinburgh, there are now branches of Starbucks (and every other coffee shop you can imagine) where once there were other retail outlets. The Gap no longer seems to be the height of fashion but then again I can no longer wander into a branch of C&A looking at all the clothes I don’t want. There’s still a good sandwich shop on every street but they’re now mixed in with branches of Tesco and Sainsburys who seem to have rediscovered town centres.

I know an eleven-year working life has allowed me to travel to places I, perhaps, would not have gone without work (and many I couldn’t have gone to with the cash from working). It certainly has allowed me to try more restaurants and cuisines of other countries than I ever though possible. I imagine I own more than I did back then but I can’t really quantify it (I may be a frying pan down and a dinner plate up but I’ve never really counted them).

I’m older, but fitter, than I was eleven years ago. I have a wider circle of friends in London than I could have thought possible eleven years ago. I’m always short of time now whereas I used to have to find things to fill the hours when I wasn’t working.

Of course the biggest change in those years has been social use of the internet: email, usenet and the web were not commonplace when I started working. It was that first job that introduced me to more than academic networks. When I first got an email address I only knew one person outside of my company who I could give it to. Now, it’s given me a career, a whole new way to express and organise myself and – probably – hours of entertainment.

All in all, I think I am a wiser, happier and more contented individual (perhaps I little more stressed). So, happy anniversary to me.