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."

Comments

The TechieGold.com goldfish

[Skyshadow]

There was a lot of great advertising (and a lot of terrible, terrible ads, too) back in like the summer of 2000. The ads were like a manifestation of how insanely much cash was being thrown around back then. Having just moved to the Valley, it was an absolutely intoxicating experience -- we had no *idea* about the level of smack that was about to be laid down on us.

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.

slide show

[same_old_story]

is the slideshow refresh speed suppoused to remind us how quickly these companies disappeared?
"oh, pets.com and"
(burst)
"oh, computers.com and"
(burst)

Reminder...

[grub]

To check out Fucked Company for the latest dot-bomb companies.

Fuck you, Forbes

[karmaflux]

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.

I worked for one of them....

[brywalker]

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.

Forgotten?

[Otter]

Today, most of these Internet pioneers are dead and gone, forgotten as the score of the game (St. Louis 23, Tennessee 16).

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.

Re:Forgotten?

[greechneb]

You mean the one that Mike Jones, the linebacker, made to stop the outstretched Kevin Dyson, at about the half yard line, since St. Louis had screwed up and let Tennessee have too much time on. The one that everyone at work talked about for weeks afterwords, the one that half the people at work had a background with that picture on it? - Nope, don't remember that one at all, now you tell me there were commercials during that game... interesting.

I was basically a drug pusher in those days

[Anonymous Coward]

'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!

Advertising perspective

[Lord_Dweomer]

Let me explain something to slashdotters about buying time in the Superbowl from an advertising perspective (yes, I'm in the industry). The Superbowl is expensive as hell, I believe current 30 sec. slots go for 2.4 mil. Unless you are a BIG company with that kind of money to toss around, you should NOT be in the Superbowl unless you are ready to risk it all.

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.

Re:the bubble bowl?

[Leo McGarry]

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?

Re:sock puppet lives on

[The-Bus]

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).

The Sock Puppet offended me!

[Saeger]

Personally, I thought that the Pets.com Sock Puppet was very offensive; it was obviously possessed by evil demon-seed and scared my innocent children half to death! All good christians know that socks are used for dirty masturbatory purposes and can cum to life!

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.

Re:the bubble bowl?

[rjelks]

How the fark are we supposed to know what NSFW means?

Re:Futurama referenced

[Tablizer]

The idiot in charge of writing that moronic javascript slideshow needs to be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.

Amen! It kept moving to the next image before I even asked it to. And, when I closed the pop-up mpeg/movie snippet viewer, it closed the original window also.

Tip to designer: If HTML can do the same thing, then do not use JavaScript instead. And, lose the image progression timer.

What a Horrid Site

[Bob Uhl]

Dear God in Heaven, that has to be the worst article (not the summary, which I enjoyed) I have ever read. I read the intro blurb, and then look aroudn for a button reading 'more' or 'next' or 'this way to the egress.' Only after mistakenly following another link do I discover that it's the ad-banner-shaped JPEG. Yeah, guys: hide a navigation device the one place any web reader ignores by default.

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?