25 YEARS OF DIGITAL ADVERTISING
To celebrate 25 years of digital advertising, Adobe suggested marketing and advertising veterans think back to what they were doing in 1994. “Camping by fax machines or mocking up print ads,” were two of the suggestions. Some were probably approving a TV commercial on a U-Matic tape player. The internet was a novelty, and many thought it would have little impact on our lives, at least not as much as it has changed the way we live and work as dramatically as it has. We were just getting used to working on a desktop computer and trying to figure out how to come to terms with the formulas on Excel and creating presentations on PowerPoint.
1994 was, however, the year the first banner ad appeared, and the age of digital advertising began. The first digital banner ad was created by Wired magazine in the US and asked, “Have you ever clicked right HERE?” Many did, and a new age of digital advertising began.
One of the early New Zealand adopters was Touchpoint’s Steve Shearman. In January 1996 he launched a search/directory website ‘Access NZ’– New Zealand’s first Yahoo. At that time, it listed all New Zealand websites – probably fewer than 200.
“As part of that site we sold banner advertising – possibly that was the first website in New Zealand to do this,” Shearman remembers. “The very first ad was for our web development company ‘Webmasters’.”
Although Webmasters made some money selling advertising to numerous advertisers over the following seven or so years – it was the thinking and technology behind that database-driven website that allowed the start-up to win contracts with ClearNet and Yellow Pages, two key projects that established the company over the following
