What 14 TV Commercials from the Dot-Com Era Tell us About Tech

By Joseph Flaherty

In population genetics, a “Founder Effect” is the long term consequences of a group being shaped by the DNA of the first members. The term is equally applicable to the tech industry where we see the personalities of the industry’s founders still echoing decades later. An interesting way to view this effect is by watching the television commercials that aired during the first dot-com boom. They’re incredibly fun time capsules, but also help to identify the themes that have animated tech as an industry over time.

“Move Fast And Break Things” Has Deep Roots

Facebook’s unofficial motto, “Move fast and break things,” has deep roots in tech. In this video, which is ostensibly advertising “The World’s first Network Services Platform for eBusiness,” a man is whisked through board meetings, given a police escort, and even evades what seems to be an East German checkpoint based on his personal charisma and a retro rocket toy/talisman.

Tech founders have earned a reputation for believing that rules don’t apply to their companies. For good and ill, picturing oneself as Prometheus, a god-like figure bringing the gift of fire to the public, consequences be damned, is not new, it’s a long-standing part of the startup mythos — however problematic it may be.

Favorite dated detail

• The multi-layer, brown business casual ensemble.

Focus On The Things That Don’t Change

When people ask Jeff Bezos about what’s coming in the next decade, he responds by asking “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?” It’s a brilliant response and one borne out by a pair of commercials for internet service providers created a decade apart. Look at these two videos:

Compuserve 1989

Aol 1999

These videos are hilariously dated in terms of style and advertised download speeds, but substantively little changed in the intervening decade, or in the years since. Email, ecommerce, news, and gaming, all featured as core selling features in these videos, and still form the core of what we do online today. The importance of photo sharing was under appreciated and access to encyclopedias proved to be less important than those in the 80s hoped, but our underlying behaviors are largely unchanged nearly 30 years later.

Favorite dated detail

• “We spent over $1M dollars building out a network.”
• The primary call to action in both commercials was a phone number, not a URL

Dot-Com Startups Were Shockingly Prescient

It’s easy to mock the excesses of the dot-com era, but it’s striking how many of the founders of these companies were right, just way, way too early. Pets.com is a laughing stock and cautionary tale, but with the benefit of two decades of infrastructure development, Chewy.com became a $3B success — one of the biggest exits in ecommerce history. The difference? Timing. The founders of many of these companies were ambitious and overly enthusiastic, not the worst of sins!

Favorite dated detail

• The pre-1080p world was ruff.

Tech Moves More Slowly Than We Think

This commercial was created two years after Netflix’s founding but predicted their streaming service eight years before it launched in 2007. The idea of video on demand was glaringly obvious to technologists of the time, though it felt as fanciful as flying cars to many people.

Twenty years later we’re still a ways away from this vision being a reality. As Micah Rosenbloom noted, many of our cultural treasures, from ER to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air are locked in IP vaults. Fragmentation of services makes having access to all content limited to those with substantial entertainment budgets. The real-time translation promised in this commercial is still the stuff of academic papers, not commercial products. It turns out the potential of video on demand is easy to envision and surprisingly to build.

Favorite dated detail

A person in their early-twenties is reading a book to pass the time instead of refreshing Instagram.

Use Cases > Platforms

From the earliest days of the internet, entrepreneurs saw the potential for selling cars online. Twenty years later, Autobytel is shockingly still in business, though no longer in the financial position to run Super Bowl ads. However, a new crop of upstarts, TrueCar and CarGurus, are building substantial businesses in the same space with value propositions that don’t stray too far from the path laid out in this commercial. Startups do best when they focus on consistent user needs, not the vagaries of the latest tech platforms.

Favorite dated detail

The idea of surfing the web being something you do in pajamas.

Adaptability > Accuracy

When the recent slate of Emmy nominations was announced, Netflix, which started out as a rival to Blockbuster and kiosks that sit outside grocery stores, rivaled major media players. In some categories, led while facing a surprising amount of competition from Amazon, which went from being a retailer to an Oscar winner in short order—all while building a multi-billion dollar computing platform service on the side.

Many people believe that startup success comes down to having a single great idea when in reality, the companies that thrive for decades aren’t better at accurately predicting the future as much as skilled at adapting to the opportunities their success present.

Favorite dated detail

Being limited to three discs at a time.

“i” is for Informality

Before the internet, a caricature of a tycoon would involve a nattily attired captain of industry — think J.P. Morgan or the Monopoly man. The industrialists of our age have broke with that tradition and popularized a shabbier sartorial standard. Now, Mark Zuckerberg runs a half-trillion dollar company in a hoodie. Sam Altman wears sneakers to exclusive Davos sessions. But the informality of the internet predates Paul Graham’s cargo shorts and goes well beyond Reddit’s spartan aesthetic. The hippy culture that shaped the Homebrew Computer Club and the time Steve Jobs’ spent on ashrams made informality an integral part of tech’s ethos from dress codes to the self-deprecating voice used in one of the first tech ads ever run during a Super Bowl.

Favorite dated detail

No designer working today would sign-off on using any version of a monospace typewriter font like Courier.

Silicon Valley’s Love of Hardware is Deathless

Juicero got its share of deserved ribbing for their overbuilt juice press, but the desire for proprietary hardware is not a recent development in the world of tech. The CueCat, a barcode scanning companion to the trusty computer mouse, was a failure of Betamax dimensions. In fact, the CueCat also shows how deep the tech world’s desire for proprietary codes, most recently embodied in QR codes, goes.

Favorite dated detail

CueCat scanning a roll of Kodak Film. So. Much. Disruption.

Bubble-phobia is as old as the Bubble

A record 14 tech startups advertised during the Super Bowl in 2000. The next year, after the crash, only three did—including Etrade which used its 30 second spot for some commentary about bad dot-com ideas. It’s been fashionable to bash silly sounding startup ideas almost since startups have been a thing, be it E-pets or Hampton Creek. Thankfully, entrepreneurs and investors haven’t been overly influenced by the naysayers. In 2001, tech looked like the Planet of the Apes, but it’s biggest impacts were still yet to come.

Favorite dated detail

A wrecking ball destroys eSocks.com. NB: In 2015 a sock company raised $50M. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

If At First, You Don’t Succeed…

Once upon a time, smart people at Apple and their marketing agency thought that a guy in ill-fitting corduroys dancing poorly through what looks like the stage of a 90s sitcom was the best way to introduce the gadget that would transform the media industry and pave the way for the biggest consumer product in history. This commercial launched four years after the Think Different Campaign when Steve Jobs was at the height of his creative powers. The “click wheel,” which would go on to turn touch-based interfaces into the dominant UI in tech, is barely demonstrated.

Fortunately, over time, the creatives at Apple arrived at a commercial aesthetic that matched the innovation present in their hardware…

…And also realized that merely highlighting their amazing engineering was a superior way to showcase their wares.

If it takes a company as creatively gifted as Apple several attempts to get their messaging right, it’s not surprising that it takes lesser companies even longer.

Think Different

This is the only commercial from this era that could be rerun today and still be 100% applicable and effective. It’s more of a Gettysburg Address commemorating Apple’s perspective on the first 30 years of the personal computing than a commercial.

When Steve Jobs introduced this campaign, he was clear that it was a statement about Apple’s unchangeable core values before an ad for the iMac. It’s a powerful reminder that we’ve been witness to a generation of entrepreneurs who weren’t merely building businesses, but who saw their role as trying to change the world for the better.

Edison wanted to electrify the world, and his company, GE, still produces medical devices that will save lives and the company is an enviable conglomerate, but is no longer on an explicit mission to change the world.

Ford makes perfectly fine cars, but the days when the company was fundamentally rethinking the way we move through space or build things is long over. Now, it’s just another car company with a specialty in manufacturing pickup trucks.

We’re lucky to have Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page & Brin still active at their companies. When they’re gone, their startups may well survive and thrive, but it will mark the end of an era.

Favorite dated detail

Nothing. You could rerun this commercial today, and it would still be as effective as it was in 1997. Here’s a fun parlor game though, who would you add from the last twenty years?