Slashdot Mirror
The Dot Com Super Bowl
An anonymous reader writes "Remember Epidemic.com and Lifeminders.com? Me neither. But Forbes has a funny story looking back on these dot-bombs and a bunch of other internet startups which advertised during the 2000 Super Bowl. They call the game The Bubble Bowl since over a dozen internet companies blew $40 million on ads, and then most of them went out of business. It's cool to see the ads (I miss the pets.com sock puppet!) and remember some of these crackheaded business ideas."
Anyhow, speaking of dot-com ads, I miss the "TechieGold.com" goldfish. There were these stupid radio commercials that played every, oh, fifteen seconds or on KSJO here in San Jose about a fish shilling for this job site. The fish would talk in a kinda-French accent about how he too could get a job if only, alas, he were not only a fish. This is back when there were still jobs in the Silicon Valley.
Then the jobs went away, the advertising dried up and I experimented with extended bouts of abject fear related to my unemployment and KSJO got bought by those motherless cocksuckers at ClearChannel and turned into a spainish language format. But still, here five years later my wife and I will occassionally slip elements of this commercial into our conversations -- last time we were at Ikea she made a comment about being "surrounded by gravel and crude decor" that made my crack up in the store and had the other proto-yuppies staring at us.
And no, I never did look at the site. Anyhow, this has been your ten second dot-com nonsequitor; you may return to your business.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It looks like these companies would do a lot better advertising on things like "Blade Runner", like Atari and TDK did. This did wonders for them.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I worked at Outpost.com which was doing all the work for Computers.com on Superbowl Sunday. Just about everyone that worked for Outpost in the sales and customer services departments worked that night, we had a ton of food and stuff while we waited for the commercial to air and the phones to start ringing off the hook. Long story short, the phones rang like 5 times. No more calls after that. Dismal failure.
'Crackheaded' is a great description. I was selling Sun and other datacenter type equipment and man I'd go on a sales call, meet with a bunch of dorks with brand new BMW's while half the office is playing fooseball and they'd want two new E10K's ASAP. Of course we'd probe into what they do and why they want them and often the reason was because the scumbag dumbass VC's LOVED companies with big iron. Now these dudes expected to make their money through site advertising and other foolish little things. Hey as long as they had the credit, we hooked em up!
I know a lot of folks look back on that and scoff, and say "eBusiness/The Internet has `failed'" and stuff...
Well, at least as far as I can tell, most of the stuff that has bailed out was stupid, superfluous, overly flashy, or otherwise destined for failure anyways.
Any of the *real* sorts of eCommerce/eBusiness stuff seems to be doing quite well, such as Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, ebay, google, slashdot, etc...
In short, I think that people who follow media hype are stupid.
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Too bad they only are showing little snippets of the ads. I would have liked to see the full ads...for those who are seeing them for the first time it's tough to figure out some of the commercials. For example, the eTrade monkey ad with the "Deliverance" guys clapping along wasn't really funny until you saw the ending tagline "Well, we just blew $3 million dollars". In fact, with that tagline it's even funnier now. :-)
There are a few more classic eTrade commercials here (bottom of the article), including the "Money coming out the wazoo" ad.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
As stated in the article, it's for car financing. I've actually seen the commercial but did not remember the name of the company.
What is more interesting is to see what of the domain names?
Pets.com domain is now owned by PetSmart, who cannot render the page in Firefox correctly.
TechieGold.com is still around.
Computer.com is owned by Tech Depot.
LifeMinders.com is owned by "Cross Media Marketing Corporation"
Epidemic.com is one of those weird search engines, this one owned by "Netincome Corp"
OurBeginning(s).com now points to Ashton Stationery.
Note none of the "noun" Dot Coms survived... Warehouse.com or Drugstore.com or Shoes.com. But there's plenty of "name" ones that people remember (eBay, etc).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The Apple Mac introduction is the most infamous techie & SuperBowl commercial. At the time people complained the commercial was too obscure, because it didnt show the product. Steve was secretive about the actual shape until the official introduction later in the year.
The 1985 commercial about the [ IBM ] suits marching off the cliff to their destruction was entertaining too.
I think there is an opportunity for a new company to use the Super Bowl to launch something. I mean, you could buy a million cheap radio spots and technically reach the same number of people with less money, but not create nearly as much impact (at least that's my guess, I've never run an ad in the Super Bowl.) But more often, it's a bigger company that launches something new- the Mac, Crystal Pepsi, etc.
But you better have something big and memorable to match your ad venue, besides just the fact that you are running a Super Bowl ad (and that you created a really catchy or funny ad.) I think that these companies got confused- they thought just running a Super Bowl ad would instantly make them 'big time', even if they actually had nothing noteworthy to sell or promote. Another poster mentioned what happened after the Computers.com ad, I can't imagine how those guys felt after they generated almost none of the response they bet their farm on.
So, to summarize, here's the 4 step plan to become as rich as Bill Gates:
1. Develop something totally new and cool that people will need or crave.
2. Develop cool or funny TV commercial.
3. Advertise on the Super Bowl.
4. Watch the orders roll in!
Too bad everyone forgot step 1!
was selling Sun and other datacenter type equipment and man I'd go on a sales call, meet with a bunch of dorks with brand new BMW's while half the office is playing fooseball and they'd want two new E10K's ASAP.
One of these days somebody is going to make a pretty entertaining movie about the dot-com madness that includes the best of the late 90's music as a soundtrack. It is one of those things that happens once every century.
It was about 12 or so years after the end of the Vietnam war that all the 'Nam movies came out. Thus, expect some dot-com nastalgia movies around 2012 or so.
Table-ized A.I.
I work at a company that was providing part of the technology driving that website. We had a few people watching the game on TV in the data center in case something happened. Two months of testing went into ensuring we could handle the load they were projecting.
I'm not sure I'm able to comment on the number of users they actually got but lets just say it was more of a hockey score than a basketball score.