I think if you polled people … actually, let’s poll people:
I think I know which one of those is going to win, but I also think it’s not the one that should win. And granted, I’m pretty biased because I had my very first job in the industry during the Dot-Com Boom. I actually processed Pets.com IOs. And I’m sure there was a lot of money in the other eras (and a lot of all kinds of other stuff too), but when it comes to lavish expenditure on speculative businesses and outrageous parties, there really is no match for Silicon Valley money.
We all have our stories from then and a lot of them have endured: the DoubleClick Willy Wonka party, which I’ve discussed on my podcast*, the poor girl from the Fox Upfront party who had an unfortunate incident on a boat**, the free swag, the endless sushi boats and steak dinners and other wild parties. Everything you can imagine and probably more.
*Season 1, Episode 3: Andrea Ching
*There are varying versions of this story, ranging from this woman killed herself to she showed up to work the next day, but I think the most common version of the story is that she worked at an ad agency, was invited to the Fox Upfront party on a boat in the Hudson River and she wore white pants and ate and drank too much. Decorum prevents me from saying anything other than the story goes that she quit her job without coming to work the next day and moved home with her parents. But at this point, the incident has taken on such a life of its own that I’m sure every city and every large ad population has a version of “the girl in the white pants” story. It’s the advertising version of Cropsey, the guy who terrorizes every sleepaway camp in the Northeast with a machete and a bloodlust that would make Michael Myers blush (under his mask, obvi).
I was reminded of this time recently when I was reminded of the wonderful book Then We Came to the End* by Joshua Ferris, which is a first person narrative set in a Chicago advertising agency at the end of this era, when no one was certain where the next check was coming from or whether they would even have a job in the coming days, weeks or months.
*”Then we came to the end” is the first line of a Don Delillo book called Americana, which I read only because of the book Then We Came to the End and is a really good book in its own right. I kind of wish “Americana” was the first line of another book, so that I could go read that, but it’s not, so I just ate some chips and took a nap instead.
But what was so fascinating and made the book such a fantastic read was how brilliantly and accurately it captured what it was like to work in advertising at that time. I’m sure it depended to some extent on what city you worked in or what part of the industry you grew up in, but this book is set in Chicago and I *swear* that half the stuff that takes place in the book actually happened in my own office. I will not spoil this book and instead will insist you should go out and read it if you haven’t.
The Dot-Com advertising era was a wonderful time to be in advertising. The sky was the limit. There was absolutely no ceiling to its potential.
Until there was.
Eventually, the money dried up because the people who invested began to realize that there was more to a successful business than just spending $4,000 on an ice sculpture that vaguely resembled Gene Wilder. When the money went away, so did the businesses. Farewell, Pets.com puppet. RIP, Kazaa and DVDs delivered to my door 24 hours a day. And with the money went the people - a lot of the 20-something year old folks who were making hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions did what everyone in their situation would do: moved back in with their folks, went to law school/business school/teacher’s college, embarked on a new career and never looked back. They had no interest in organizing the deck chairs on the Titanic, so they went to go organize deck chairs on something else.
My first job in advertising was in ad operations. My job was to take the IOs that people gave me, key them into Netgravity* by hand and then attach the creative** to those IOs and set them live. From there, I would go to the website and take a screenshot to prove it was actually running. The next day, I’d pull reporting to make sure it was actually running. Gradually, things got more complicated with things like 3rd party ad serving, rich media creatives, 1x1 pixels, page coding restrictions, viewability pixels. I had to stand up for a second to shake the palpable chill that I got even writing those things down again.
*Netgravity became DART Enterprise, which became DoubleClick Enterprise, which was then taken out behind the barn and shot in the late aughts/early teens. It deserved a better fate.
**Creative was called copy by people who worked in TV, which was EVERYONE else who worked at my company with the exception of like 7 other people
But since this was the early days of the internet before everything got complex, it almost never worked as easily as it was supposed to. That meant that I spent days and days on the phone with extremely technical people in a conversation that resembled this:
Me: It’s not working
Them: Try this
Me: It’s still not working
Them: Did you push the database?
Me: Yes
Them: Did you try this other thing?
Me: …
All this is to say that working in ad operations* meant you had to be scrappy (because there weren’t many of us), resourceful (because there were 16 things that could be wrong with any one campaign) and optimistic (because you had to believe that you could fix it). Frequently, the error was extremely human like a poor cut and paste, a fat finger entry or a click thru where an image URL should be and eventually you got a magnifying glass out and you figured it out. But more times than you wanted it to be, it was just a problem with “the system”. It didn’t work. You hit enter again. It worked.
*It’s worth mentioning that what I called ad operations is now called revenue operations, because optics is everything, and whoever figured out this rebrand deserves a Nobel Prize
Technology is weird.
And as weird as technology is, ad tech is weirder. But I’m convinced it’s that weirdness that allowed me to survive the Dot-Com Bust - I made it out of Joshua Ferris’s book alive and into the sequel. I know that when they were looking at people to let go when the whole thing went to hell, they looked at me as said “we can’t get rid of him because he’s the only one here who knows how this shit works.” Eventually, that led me to a leadership position, which lead me to building teams and managing them, which gave me professional relationship chops, which got me a call from someone who wanted to move me into sales, which landed me where I am today.
If it weren’t for my background in ad ops, none of this would be possible. I firmly believe that.
I’m not much for nostalgia. I think it tends distract me from actually enjoying the days that I’m living now. Then We Came to the End is a worthwhile read for a lot of reasons and sometimes it’s fun to look back on times with fondness (and a small bit of self-loathing).
It keeps you honest.
OK, conference season is mostly done here, but there’s one left: BeetTV in Santa Monica is in a few weeks. I’ll be there, alongside some of the outstanding OpenX staff - if you’re going to be there or you live in the area and want to hang, let me know. We’ll make it happen.
Also, reminder that Movember is coming. If you want to join the OpenX Mustache Exchange and grow yourself a painfully awkward piece of facial hair, you let me know and we’ll put you on our team. We’d love to have you.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time, friends
Netgravity brought back so many memories!