My post on the Ad Server's 20th birthday was published in AdExchanger today. The focus was on the waves of change that have hit the digital advertising world since those early days. Believe it or not, it all began with a condom ad!
The first ad server is actually preserved in a shadow box in my home office (pic above). And there are a bunch of great sources available online to learn about that era:
- If you are interested in audio, there's an oral history of the early days of digital advertising and the first ad server put together by the Internet History Podcast when they did a live interview with me in 2014. Brian Mccullough did an excellent job with the interview, as he does with some many of his oral histories.
- If you are interested in short, but more focused piece on the history of how the first ad server was developed, I wrote a blog post on the topic in 2009.
- And, of course, Wikipedia has an article on the ad server that is pretty accurate.
Do you have recollections of those early days? How do you think digital advertising has changed since then? Leave me a comment to let me know.
