Tenth birthday of the humble banner advert

Oh no, we missed another birthday. This time it was the tenth birthday of the humble banner advert. On October 25, 1994 the first banner advert appeared on HotWired. Interestingly, it did not make news and the whole world missed it, probably because it seems to have been around longer than that. And whereas the fledgling industry of 1994 had trouble explaining what the internet was, the internet will account for 3.5% of global advertising expenditure in 2004.

The AT&T advert's slogan was "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE?" and the advert was created in the 468 x 60 pixel format because it suited the site's layout.

For the record, the ad was created for Modem Media/AT&T by TANGENT Design/Communications and courtesy of Adland

The advert's principal creators were Joe McCambley, Craig Kanarick and Otto Timmons.

Timmons wrote on Adland recently, "although we had the most popular ad on Hotwired there were at least five or six other banner ads that launched at the same time and they too should get credit for being "first". I can remember Club Med, AT&T and ZIMA.

"Last but not least, O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator, GNN, started accepting paid advertising at the same time (one banner ad on the home page, as I recall)."

Of course in 1994 if you were using the internet, you were either in tertiary education or the military and the web was beginning the spectacular growth which now sees it heading for a billion users (to be reached some time in mid-2005). The Computer Industry Almanac expects the use population will reach nearly 935 million by the end of 2004.

In those early years there weren't a lot of banner advertisements around, and for a time the novelty drove pricing upwards. Interactive advertising agencies commonly claimed 25+% click-through rates.

Ten years on, the banner's subsequent siblings, such as the pop-up, pop-under, superbanners, interstitials and text adverts are all competing for attention. People have grown weary of the bombardment and click-through figures are wayyyyyy less than 1%.

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