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A Postmodern History of Internet Advertising Part I

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A Postmodern History of Internet Advertising Part I CHARM 2017 Proceedings A Postmodern History of Internet Advertising Part I 67 Lilly Anne Buchwitz Humber College, Toronto, Canada Abstract Purpose—This paper explains the methodology and background to A Model of Periodization of Radio and Internet Advertising History (presented at CHARM 2015 Long Beach), which compares the development of advertising on two new media, radio and Internet. Design/methodology/approach—The research is based on historic and contemporary materials, and mediated through the personal experience of the researcher. It incorporates the methodology of new historicism and is influenced by postmodern historiography and postmodern marketing. Originality/value—The literature review is itself a history, and the model which emerged from this research is also original. Keywords Internet history, Internet advertising, radio history, radio advertising, advertising history, marketing history, postmodern marketing Paper type Research paper Introduction When the World Wide Web emerged as a new mass medium for communications in the early 1990s it was quickly embraced by consumers—but not by marketers. Home Internet access was relatively inexpensive, all one needed was a computer and a Web browser for the whole world of information to be available at one’s fingertips. But when the first advertising appeared on a website in 1994 it was immediately despised by those consumers, not to mention harshly criticized by Web developers and ignored by most reputable marketers. Only a few forward thinking, imaginative marketers dared to experiment with the new medium as a platform for advertising. This paper is presented in two parts: Part I, which describes the epistemological foundation of the history of Internet advertising, including the model of periodization of that history; and Part II, a work in progress which describes the history of Internet advertising to the present day, organized according to the model. Though the history of Internet advertising is short in terms of timespan it is nonetheless rich in detail and significant in terms of the evolution of forms of advertising. It is challenging to document Internet advertising history for several reasons. First, because “Internet time” moves so quickly and changes in the use of the new media happen so rapidly, its history must be documented almost immediately or the opportunity is lost. There exists little academic research into Internet advertising from a historical perspective because Internet advertisements are almost never preserved in their original form, so the more time passes, the more this history will be irretrievably lost. This is due to the nature of the Web as a publishing and advertising medium. Unlike magazines and newspapers which are typically preserved in their original form or which have their pages microfilmed, a Web page comes together only when it is viewed by a consumer. Therefore, even when banner ads and other forms of Internet advertising are saved, they are saved as static images, separated from the Web page on which they appeared. Their form, animation, and context are lost. And perhaps the biggest challenge to the Internet historian is the conflicting interests of advertiser, advertising agency, and content publisher. Though the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of an Internet library, collects historical versions of websites, including those that sell advertising space, in those collections the advertising is stripped from the content because it is owned by either the advertiser or a creative agency, and when the relationship between that advertiser and its agency ends, the mutually-created ads disappear from the public record. In the early days of the Internet no one thought to preserve websites, much less Web advertisements, for later study. Though the Internet Archive began archiving websites in 1996, advertisements, because they were served onto the Web page separately from the content, were not captured. For example, if you go to the Internet Archive’s website and use the Wayback Machine (wayback.archive.org) to look at the October 1996 home page of Netscape.com, the most popular A Postmodern website at that time, you will see a blank rectangle at the top of the page. That’s where the History advertisement, when the page was live, was displayed. Other early websites that sold advertising, such of Internet as Yahoo!, can also be found in the Internet Archives, and sometimes remnants of their banner ads can Advertising Part I be seen, but only as static images captured when the “snapshot” of the page was saved. Those ads, when they actually appeared on those websites, would have been animated, and would have linked to microsites or other promotional websites, but none of this can be seen any longer. To view only a static 68 image of an online advertisement is akin to viewing only 1/8 of the page of a full-page magazine ad, or viewing only three seconds of a 30 second television commercial. Without form and context, the ad cannot be comprehended. There is nowhere on the Internet where you can find, and view, what the home page of Hotwired.com looked like in October 1994, when the first-ever banner ad appeared there. Most of the actual Internet advertisements—banner ads—that appeared on websites during those early years were lost, and those that were preserved exist only in private collections. Information about the earliest online marketers can be found in newspapers and magazines, but some of the best stories about these marketing pioneers were told in the trade magazines of the time (Websight magazine; Netguide magazine, Internet World magazine, Web World magazine, etc.), most of which were short-lived and never indexed. Academic marketing research during the early Internet years made almost no mention of Internet advertising but instead focused on the use of, effectiveness of, and consumer response to, corporate websites—which are not, strictly speaking, advertising. As the years passed academic researchers began to investigate true Internet advertising as a phenomenon but continued to focus on either measurements of effectiveness or consumer response. In the professional world of Internet marketing, the field in which I worked as a manager for six years, research interests are even narrower. When it comes to Internet advertising the main research questions of interest to marketing professionals are: (1) How effective is the advertisement?; (2) How can effectiveness be measured?; and, more recently (3) How can advertisers and content publishers defeat the use of ad blocking software? Researchers both academic and corporate have been entirely uninterested in the forms of Internet advertising, and in the relationship between these forms of advertising and the growth of the new medium. This gap in historical knowledge, therefore, became my primary interest. As a professional Internet marketer I remember when the first advertising appeared on the Internet and the controversies it caused, so my first task as an academic researcher was to collect and organize as much data about the early years of the Internet as possible, searching through each piece of data for some information about Internet advertising. The main sources of this data were trade magazines from my personal collection, trade books published during the early 1990s, general newspapers from the United States and Canada, and business and marketing magazines. It was, in fact, my personal collection of historical artifacts from the early years of Internet advertising that originally inspired my academic research, and I later learned that in the discipline of marketing history, “the serendipitous discovery of a neglected lode of important historical evidence may sometimes be reason enough for launching a project” (Witkowski and Jones, 2006, p. 72). The relationship between the Internet as a new medium and the forms of advertising that emerged and developed upon it up to 2008 was the subject of A Narrative History of Radio and Internet Advertising (Buchwitz, 2012); and a model of periodization proposed that the development of advertising on a new medium advances through four phases: technology, content, advertising, and advertising-becomes-content (Buchwitz, 2015). Part II of this paper reiterates the history of Internet advertising, updates it with recent developments, and proposes that the fourth phase, advertising- becomes-content, is the final phase which continues indefinitely with no ending point, just as the asymptote of a curve approaches, but never reaches, the line. Methodology This research presents a postmodern narrative history of Internet advertising based on both historic and contemporary materials and mediated through the personal experience of the researcher. When the historian has had the opportunity to participate in the events under study he or she can offer an “I was there” perspective, and include details neglected by or unavailable to historians writing after the fact (Tuchman, 1982). For this reason the use of the first person perspective is employed occasionally. The history is offered as an explanatory and illuminative narrative constructed from a multitude of sources both personal and public, in which the main “character,” so to speak, is forms of advertising. CHARM 2017 History is both a field of study in and of itself and a methodology for the study of other Proceedings disciplines. Historical research requires an epistemology, a point of view regarding the meaning of history, and the awareness that without historical context, patterns are meaningless (Tuchman, 1994). The term narrative qualifies history in an epistemological sense. It suggests that the knower of facts is recounting a history based on facts that are knowable, or were known and perhaps forgotten, rather than those that were made (up) as in the case of fiction (White, 2010). At its most basic, history is the 69 organization and representation of knowledge (Bentley, 1999), but it is also a forensic study of texts and artifacts such as journals and chronicles which themselves are differentiated from “histories” in that they straightforwardly recount events as they occurred, in chronological order.
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