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The Dot Com Super Bowl 288

Posted by michael from the delay-of-game dept.
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."
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The Dot Com Super Bowl More

The Dot Com Super Bowl

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  • The TechieGold.com goldfish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Skyshadow ( 508 ) * on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:18PM (#11506516) Homepage
    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.

    • I really liked the cadillac ad. Where the guy is driving his suv cadillac, stops (180 spin) and then the sound catches up to him.

      . I remember, a couple of years ago, there was an ad placed by mistake. As in the company bought a cheap, non-primetime ad and by mistake it got placed during the superbowl.

      I believe those ads are around 500k-1mil per 30 second slots...talk about pricey.

      my fav is still the brittney spears ads - well cause she is good looking
      • I think they allocate a certain number of blocks for cheap local commercials. Atleast some affiliates must, because I've always seen crappy budget local ads during the superbowl in the few TV markets I have lived in.
    • those motherless cocksuckers at ClearChannel and turned into a spainish language format

      I think you mean los chupos del pene sin madre.

      (ok, no, I don't actually know Spanish)

  • Forbes web site is one big commercial (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:18PM (#11506521) Homepage
    Maybe it's just me, but I felt like when I went to the Forbes site I felt like it was one big commercial. The first link has about a dozen ads, and the second link is doing constant updates - seemed to be worse in IE than Firefox.

  • Geeks in business (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MyLongNickName ( 822545 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:20PM (#11506540) Journal
    But everyone knows that geeks know everything about business, and the PHBs are the ones who destroy business! How could all these big geek corps go out of business? I blame Bill Gates and George Bush.
    • But everyone knows that geeks know everything about business, and the PHBs are the ones who destroy business! How could all these big geek corps go out of business? I blame Bill Gates and George Bush.

      If you are going to be sarcastic, could you please try to either be informative, or funny.

      kthx.
    • Point taken, that nature of the echonomy back in 2000 was much different. Geeks were considered the way to the future, of profit. But part of the problem is that we got greedy and started asking for more money then we were honestly worth. A normal cubial programmer developing a web site should not be getting $100k a year. So when the .COMs started to slide they give them an option less pay to quit. (Because the job market is still large at the time most decided to get laid off because they can find an ot
      • I think my larger point was that each of us makes up part of a team. Put a PHB in charge of setting the specs for a large program, and you are in trouble. Put a code monkey in charge of marketing, and you are in trouble. I see a billion rants about stupid managers, and how Slashdot Geek #12345 knows how it is done. The bubble proved that business decisions should be made by those with business sense.
        • I don't think the dot com bust proved that.

          I think it proved that there were a lot of companies who sold software that people were not willing to pay for.

          That's what it proved.
        • Well I don't think it was about marketing the code monkey did a good job at that, if they didn't do the job at marketing then the Dot Bomb would never have started. People did by stuff online or at least looked at it the problem was that they realized there was no real value to some of this stuff online vs. going to a store. Paying Shipping on a 40 lbs bag of dogfood makes the savings a lot less. Then there is the lost value of having to wait for it to ship. It was more of an issue that there money was co

    • I blame Bill Gates and George Bush.

      Funny how you can't use these names at all on /. anymore without someone jumping in to make sure your comment is depracted. "Troll" ? Hey, I think there's probably quite a few people who share this general feeling - not trying to prove blame, or anything - just generalized disconent without a target.

      I haven't heard anyone blaming e.g. Bill Clinton or Martha Steward for the .com crash, for instance ... Of course, having brought this up here, I probably will, now.

      • Funny how you can't use these names at all on /. anymore without someone jumping in to make sure your comment is depracted. "Troll" ? Hey, I think there's probably quite a few people who share this general feeling - not trying to prove blame, or anything - just generalized disconent without a target.

        It isn't just that he used the names, he was obviously insulting the readers of slashdot. Furthermore he was muddying the waters by comparing Bill Gates and George Bush, two people who are very different.

        Also
        • Bill Gates was somewhat indirectly involved. The antitrust trial judgement to split Microsoft was the trigger that burst the stock market bubble. It was inevitable anyway. If it wasn't the Microsoft verdict it would have been something else, but if you can point to one time that everyone started selling off in panic, that would be it.

    • But everyone knows that geeks know everything about business, and the PHBs are the ones who destroy business! How could all these big geek corps go out of business?

      Because it weren't geek corps.

      Geek corps go bankrupt because they don't advertise or advertise wrongly. But they usually don't go bankrupt for starting with an entirely stupid idea which only takes off for a while because greedy bankers stick all the money they get up the geeks' asses because the bankers somewhere heard that "the internet"

      • Re:Geeks in business (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bartle ( 447377 )
        All they know is that there must be growth, growth, growth. So here they found something where they believed it would promise growth and wealthiness beyond imagination -- and for a short period of time they were right. Because they pumped money in like mad.

        I worked for Epidemic.com in a technical capacity during it's brief bolide existance and though I didn't sit in on all the high level meetings I walked out of there with a sense that the whole company had been conned. It was obvious to everyone in the

  • dizzy refresh rate (Score:4, Informative)

    by mortonda ( 5175 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:21PM (#11506543)
    Can anyone here actually read the entire slide before it reloads a new slide?

  • Fuck I work for Kforce. (Score:3, Funny)

    by F34nor ( 321515 ) * on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:21PM (#11506548)
    and my job is going NOWHERE.

  • sock puppet lives on (Score:4, Informative)

    by bigbigbison ( 104532 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:23PM (#11506576) Homepage
    The pets'com sock puppet lives on in commercials for insurance company 1-800-Bar-None [barnone.com].

    • Re:sock puppet lives on (Score:4, Funny)

      by The I Shing ( 700142 ) * on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:28PM (#11506636) Journal
      And when Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was interviewing the members of Bon Jovi, he commented on the fact that they were using his image on some of the passes. "I'll sue your asses!" he shouts at them, "I'm not kidding! Ask the sock puppet!" and then the scene cuts to him having his way with the sock puppet while huffing, "Say my name! What's my name?! Say it! Say my name!" Ah, late night TV.
    • it's not an insurance company. it's a_21%_car_loan_for_people_with_bad_credit company

    • Re:sock puppet lives on (Score:5, Interesting)

      by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:59PM (#11507031)
      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).

      • Re:sock puppet lives on (Score:2, Insightful)

        by PCM2 ( 4486 )
        Note none of the "noun" Dot Coms survived... Warehouse.com or Drugstore.com or Shoes.com.

        Whaa--? Drugstore.com is still around. The Warehouse.com domain is owned by CDW, which bought MacWarehouse and MicroWarehouse, etc. I don't know if Shoes.com is the original, but it looks like an online shoestore to me. If the name recognition on "noun" dot-coms is so poor, you'd think they would have all just packed it in by now.

  • Better off advertising on Blade Runner (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:25PM (#11506599)
    It looks like these companies would do a lot better advertising on things like "Blade Runner", like Atari and TDK did. This did wonders for them.

  • let's not single out the people with ideas... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jxyama ( 821091 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:25PM (#11506607)
    >remember some of these crackheaded business ideas

    let's not single out the people with "crackheaded" ideas for scrutny and remember the VCs that believed those ideas were worth their money.

  • slide show (Score:5, Funny)

    by same_old_story ( 833424 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:25PM (#11506609)
    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... (Score:4, Informative)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:26PM (#11506613) Homepage Journal

    To check out Fucked Company [fuckedcompany.com] for the latest dot-bomb companies.

  • Fuck you, Forbes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by karmaflux ( 148909 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:26PM (#11506614)
    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.
  • ...we also had Adcritic [adcritic.com] as a free and enterprising service to see all our Ads for free. Now see what it has becomes :-(

  • Day trading (Score:4, Funny)

    by adam31 ( 817930 ) <adam31@NoSpAM.gmail.com> on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:29PM (#11506649)
    E*trade's harsh reality:
    The day traders went broke and had to get real jobs

    More like had to start doing their real jobs at their real jobs... until those went bust. And then they had to get real jobs.

  • I worked for one of them.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brywalker ( 738506 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:29PM (#11506651)
    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.

  • the bubble bowl? (Score:3, Funny)

    by jxyama ( 821091 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:29PM (#11506656)
    totally off topic, but if 2000 super bowl can be dubbed the "bubble" bowl, then 2004 would naturally be remembered as...

    the breast bowl!! [janetjacksonbreast.com] (NSFW)

  • Boy that makes me just want to go back to those times, when people with no valid business plan would get cash handed to them on a silver platter, just because of the term "Internet" in their mission statement. Techies like us getting overpaid to do nothing.

    <sarcasm>
    Wait a sec, no it doesn't, I'd rather be here in these times, with all these good jobs, and job security, what was I thinking?
    </sarcasm>

  • Forgotten? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:31PM (#11506679) Journal
    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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by greechneb ( 574646 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:44PM (#11506841) Journal
      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.
    • Leon Lett.

      That is all.
    • Apart from the fact that yes, it was a good football game, that's just plain bad writing. "It's as forgotten as this thing that I, the author, remember in perfect detail." Dumbass writer, and a double dumbass on the editor who let it slip through.

  • I was basically a drug pusher in those days (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:31PM (#11506680)
    '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!

    • Prick for Day (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )
      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.

      One of these days somebody is going to make a pretty entertaining movie about the dot-com madness that includes the best of the late 90's music as a soundtrack. It is one of those things that happens once every century.

      It was about 12 or so years after the end of the Vietnam war that all the 'Na

  • About the Dot Bombs... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:31PM (#11506684)
    I know a lot of folks look back on that and scoff, and say "eBusiness/The Internet has `failed'" and stuff...

    Well, at least as far as I can tell, most of the stuff that has bailed out was stupid, superfluous, overly flashy, or otherwise destined for failure anyways.

    Any of the *real* sorts of eCommerce/eBusiness stuff seems to be doing quite well, such as Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, ebay, google, slashdot, etc...

    In short, I think that people who follow media hype are stupid.
    • Well, at least as far as I can tell, most of the stuff that has bailed out was stupid, superfluous, overly flashy, or otherwise destined for failure anyways.

      Sounds pretty much right to me. Seems like a lot of the ventures that failed consisted of people who didn't understand the potential of the internet selling business proposals to other people who didn't understand the internet at all. They were crappy business proposals that would have been thrown out immediately, but because it had the work "interne

  • You guys CAN slow down the slide show (Score:3, Informative)

    by L0phtpDK ( 711021 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:32PM (#11506689)
    Look up top... see the blue bar with large Forbes log... ahh what is this next to it? "Previous... Slower... ah ha!" I am no medical genious, but I beleive that this button may make the slide show move slower.
  • Look at all the banner ads and popups in webpages. Those pay-per-click advertisements.

    People in these online businesses still have no freaking idea of how the web works.. the heck! how a business works!

    They failed in the .com bubble, and i predict there will be the pay-per-click bubble, too.
  • Cat Herding [i-am-bored.com]

  • Not the full ads... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by John3 ( 85454 ) <(john3) (at) (cornells.com)> on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:40PM (#11506799) Homepage Journal
    Too bad they only are showing little snippets of the ads. I would have liked to see the full ads...for those who are seeing them for the first time it's tough to figure out some of the commercials. For example, the eTrade monkey ad with the "Deliverance" guys clapping along wasn't really funny until you saw the ending tagline "Well, we just blew $3 million dollars". In fact, with that tagline it's even funnier now. :-)

    There are a few more classic eTrade commercials here [superbowl-info.com] (bottom of the article), including the "Money coming out the wazoo" ad [superbowl-info.com].
    • i think the "money coming out the wazoo" ad was one of my favorite ever. except maybe the salmon comercial with the guy karate fighting the bear.

  • Advertising perspective (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:41PM (#11506815) Homepage
    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.

    • I really don't understand this whole branding crap, I know what brands I like and don't like already, show me 24 hours worth of pepsi adverts and im still going to buy coke, my choice of where to shop or eat is based solely on where i currently am and what I already like. When I buy new shoes, I only buy the pair that I think look best, not Nike or Reebok: the pair that I think look best. I don't buy a car, gadget or computer because I like the brand, I buy it because of the price and the review. One thing
      • Read "No Logo" (Naomi Klein), then understand exactly why you aren't the target audience for branding.

    • Sooner or later... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by madmaxmedia ( 775327 )
      The one thing about Super Bowl advertising is that it is the only advertising that is an event unto itself (did I say that right?)

      I think there is an opportunity for a new company to use the Super Bowl to launch something. I mean, you could buy a million cheap radio spots and technically reach the same number of people with less money, but not create nearly as much impact (at least that's my guess, I've never run an ad in the Super Bowl.) But more often, it's a bigger company that launches something new-

    • [...] 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. [...]

      You have seen the trees but not the forest. During the bubble, Nortel ran endless branding ads. Why? Individual consumers did not buy their products. No, but they did buy their stock.

      Once

  • Stupid me (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )
    During the dot-com heyday, many of us secretly agreed that it would probably mostly crash and burn one day. Even a co-inventor of the Internet was predicting a crash. I once lightly entertained the idea of making screenshots of some of the more extreme sites with their wacky melted-plastic punk look as kind of a dot-com scrap book.

    If I had bothered to go through with the idea, then I could have created a "Dot-com memory lane" website that would have pretty good traffic in which I could sell ad space.

    I can

    • Re:Stupid me (Score:3, Insightful)

      by t_allardyce ( 48447 )
      I remember predicting it wouldn't last too, it was just a gold rush for the few viable business ideas, the trouble was all the stupid PHB investors had no idea what it was all about and just pumped millions into it assuming it was the next biggest thing. 'gotta invest in a dot com' - Im no economics expert, but I don't see why most of these companies needed more than about $20,000 to get off to a decent start, also why anyone would need a separate net shop for separate things - amazon for example does well
    • You mean to tell me Al Gore knew his invention was doomed to crash? What the hell?

      -Matt

  • Ultimate Marketing Technique (Score:4, Funny)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @02:47PM (#11506875) Homepage Journal
    All that marketing didn't bring them much name recognition at all. If you want to remain the talk of the town for YEARS after your commercial, just fund a Janet Jackson nipple slip. Instead of the EDS herding cats commercial, they could have just stuck an big EDS sticker over Janet's errant nipple and they'd have been the talk of the town for YEARS! Yes, I forsee a time when nipple real estate is the most coveted... what? It already is? Damn, and I was going to patent the idea...

  • I thought I'd put together a site [tubespot.com] full of funny web commercials similar to what Ad Critic was a few years ago before they went out of business. This is a bit of a rough draft. The site interface still needs some work, and I plan to add a voting/rating script as well as a discussion script for each ad.

    I'm also going to record the entire Superbowl on Sunday and hope to have all of those ads up by the following Monday. The ones I have up right now were recorded from a TV show (silly overlay graphics and all

  • The Sock Puppet offended me! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Saeger ( 456549 ) <(farrellj) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday January 28, 2005 @03:06PM (#11507140) Homepage
    Personally, I thought that the Pets.com Sock Puppet [safeshopper.com] 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.

  • I'd guess there will be a fair number of goofy Budweiser and Pepsi commercials. Last year the controversy was election commercials- the moveOn.org stuff. I wonder if anyone would spoof the "wardrobe malfunction"?
  • tieclasp.com and pimentoloaf.com!

  • MacIntosh introduced in 1984 SuperBowl (Score:4, Interesting)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @03:20PM (#11507324)
    The Apple Mac introduction is the most infamous techie & SuperBowl commercial. At the time people complained the commercial was too obscure, because it didnt show the product. Steve was secretive about the actual shape until the official introduction later in the year.

    The 1985 commercial about the [ IBM ] suits marching off the cliff to their destruction was entertaining too.

  • What a Horrid Site (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bob Uhl ( 30977 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @03:54PM (#11507745)
    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?

    • Re:What a Horrid Site (Score:3, Informative)

      by DrDebug ( 10230 )
      I was merrily following the link to the slideshow, when I discovered that I needed to install the RealPlayer plugin. That ended that quest.

      Realplayer is known for it's spyware and other system pollution. I will never put Realplayer product on a system ever again.

  • Forbes' short memory (Score:3, Insightful)

    by amightywind ( 691887 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @04:33PM (#11508286) Journal

    I find it interesting that Forbes casts the dotcom bubble in such a negative light when at the time they were the formost cheerleader of the worst episode corporate corruption in 60 years. No hypocracy there.

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