Source: TheDrum
Adobe has hired the team behind HBO’s Westworld and Game of Thrones experiences at SXSW to take marketers back in time to the offices where the very first digital banner ads were created.
The Back to the 90s experience opened at the Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. Giant Spoon, which is best known for its live campaigns designed to promote entertainment brands, has created what its experiential account director, Monica Vergel de Dios, dubbed a “dollhouse setup” comprising three rooms.
The first is an advertising agency straight out of the 90s, at a time when the office is gearing up to design and place the first ever banner ad. Visitors to the activation are ushered in by a frantic manager who informs them of their intern status and orders them to load up the design of a Pizza Hut ad – the actual first digital banner to go live – from an unreliable floppy disk.
The office itself is decked out with an assortment of 90s paraphernalia: Furbies, Apple Macs and terrible inspirational posters adorn the walls.
Once their internship is complete guests are ushered into a video store ala Blockbuster before heading into a living room to watch their VHS and order pizza online using a desktop home computer.
Each room represents a product of Adobe’s Experience Cloud by way of proving the frustrations and inefficiencies of each outmoded process: uploading the first banner ad proves the ease of Advertising Cloud and selecting a movie without help from a data-driven algorithm showcases the usefulness of Marketing Cloud, for instance.
“The end goal is for [delegates] to see how great technology has made their lives today,” said Mark Boothe, head of Adobe Experience Cloud social media. “All of these things used to be so difficult – launching the first digital ad was a disaster, it was a mess. The tech didn’t even work. Now it’s nothing like that – approvals are easy. You can launch [a campaign] in minutes, not hours or days.”
The idea of bringing the 90s to Summit to mark 25 years since the first banner ad came from Adobe’s PR team, and the agency Giant Spoon was selected for implementation.
