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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.
Maybe it's just me, but I felt like when I went to the Forbes site I felt like it was one big commercial. The first link has about a dozen ads, and the second link is doing constant updates - seemed to be worse in IE than Firefox.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Can anyone here actually read the entire slide before it reloads a new slide?
The pets'com sock puppet lives on in commercials for insurance company 1-800-Bar-None.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
let's not single out the people with "crackheaded" ideas for scrutny and remember the VCs that believed those ideas were worth their money.
is the slideshow refresh speed suppoused to remind us how quickly these companies disappeared?
"oh, pets.com and"
(burst)
"oh, computers.com and"
(burst)
To check out Fucked Company for the latest dot-bomb companies.
Trolling is a art,
I read the article. Some of it was amusing.
But the idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be shot. Or fired. Or both.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
The day traders went broke and had to get real jobs
More like had to start doing their real jobs at their real jobs... until those went bust. And then they had to get real jobs.
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.
The idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.
The tackle on the one yard line, with time expired, to prevent a game-tying touchdown? Yeah, there's probably not a football fan alive who remembers that ending. I guess my brain is too full of memories of the Cowboys beating the Bills 48-14 six years in a row.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
'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.
do() || do_not();
Look up top... see the blue bar with large Forbes log... ahh what is this next to it? "Previous... Slower... ah ha!" I am no medical genious, but I beleive that this button may make the slide show move slower.
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
Reading AdAge (industry publication) it is interesting to see that most of the spots that the companies are going to be airing are not product related spots, but rather branding spots. These are designed to increase your awareness of the brand, and to make you remember the company more. Branding of that scale is usually only best for companies that have an established foot print in the market place, and that have a customerbase who is already aware of their products.
Once you think about that for a bit, it is pretty obvious how foolish it was of the dotcoms to advertise during the Superbowl. Although I'm sure the media buyers and sellers that took part were MORE than happy to collect those commissions.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
All that marketing didn't bring them much name recognition at all. If you want to remain the talk of the town for YEARS after your commercial, just fund a Janet Jackson nipple slip. Instead of the EDS herding cats commercial, they could have just stuck an big EDS sticker over Janet's errant nipple and they'd have been the talk of the town for YEARS! Yes, I forsee a time when nipple real estate is the most coveted... what? It already is? Damn, and I was going to patent the idea...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
am i mistaken to think that "NSFW" is not a commonly used acronym here..?
Yes. You are also mistaken to think that sentences aren't supposed to begin with capital letters, that the personal pronoun "I" can be used without capitalization, that two periods followed by a question mark is a punctuation mark and that it's okay to end a sentence with an ellipsis without a period.
Furthermore, please avoid the use of acronyms that aren't already accepted as words themselves. You can say things like "DVD" and "CPU" because they're universally understood, but generally acronyms serve only to hinder communication, not to facilitate it. This isn't 1850. You're not Western Union by the letter.
At this very moment, this Web site is running a story called "Don't Write FORTRAN" that cleverly (or, you know, not) admonishes computer programmers for writing illiterate computer code. Might I humbly suggest that we hold ourselves to the same standard when it comes to things meant to be read by other human beings?
Anyway, I am glad that this upcoming G-Rated SuperBowl wouldn't allow such a dirty puppet on-air! They even renamed the "Best Damn Sports Show Period" to the "The Best DARN Sports Show Period". God bless their hearts.
Power to the Peaceful
How the fark are we supposed to know what NSFW means?
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Don't know why you posted AC... love the Sports Guy and I'm sure a lot of other slashdotters do as well.... the site looks cool, if a bit bare bones.
If any mods are fans as well, mod parent up. If you aren't, well start reading the Sports Guy!
Sports Guy's World
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.
Then the slideshow starts, and I glance away at my other box to do some more work--only to discover that it's done. It automatically changes slides, unlike every other gallery and in fact site on the Internet, which lets one choose when to change pages. Peeved, I click 'previous' a dozen times (they don't give one a 'first' button), then quickly hit 'stop' (yeah, thanks for making me work at this, forbes.com). I read the first slide, chuckle and hit 'next.' The next slide appears, and as I'm reading it, it changes: they don't remember that one wants the show to be stopped!
What sort of microcephalic twit would think this is a good browsing experience?