Early firsts : Ecommerce and Dayparting

I think I’m getting sentimental or just paranoid of my memory going. I’m thinking back to early digital experiences and realizing how early on I emigrated from advertising to the web.

In 1995, America On-Line was very precious and didn’t allow anything commercial (this would be amusing years later when it became a shopping mall), but CompuServe had an online store where you could, get this, buy directly. I was a copywriter at FCB and for our client Rayovac Batteries, and with Sean Connolly and Adam Gargani, we set up a mini-store in what would be one of the first ecommerce plays for a packaged good. I wrote sell copy in formats I had never done before, and within a few weeks, we had sold thirty (30!) sets of rechargeable batteries. I remember being excited, feeling the rush of actually selling something directly to people.

Just a few months later, Nabisco wanted to be among the first corporate web sites, so my art director Miguel and I concepted a Nabisco “town,” where Town Hall would have corporate and HR information, the park would have Oreos, a cafe would have Cream of Wheat, and so on. We created the design comps but to program it, we went over to then-True North partner Robert Greenberg & Associates on West 39th Street, who seemed to be the only ones in town who knew how to actually program it. (I would return ten years later to work there as a creative director when it was hot interactive shop R/GA). Realizing that people could come to nabisco.com at any hour of the day, we suggested it go dark at night and those crazy programmers were able to do it. Yup, this is one of the earliest examples of day-parting on the web. Later, there were tons more virtual towns for brands but this was before all that.

I'll try to update this with screengrabs but my images are all on FLOPPY disks ;-)