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.
In theory, the web should be able to hold a complete record of how it came to be. In reality, so much material is deleted that a history on online advertising is hard to find. Good to see @Digiday has an oral history of the first banner ad: https://t.co/EmpHCc6Ity
— Jon Curnow (@curns) November 8, 2017
(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 for 24 years today. I haven’t had the time to write anything about that, but I just discovered that I did write about it in 2004, after 11 years in the city, which is probably still relevant.