What is Paleo Ad Tech? It’s quite simple, really: a passion project by a couple of people who work at a big software company and come from the world of ad agencies, creatives and dreamers. The topic: the history of advertising technology from 1995 to 2015 — aka the glory years. NetScape, DoubleClick, AdECN, Invite Media, Yahoo! and ad networks and the birth of RTB and so on. Big players like Microsoft and Google facing off over ad servers (remember Atlas?) … and smaller players like Undertone and Interclick and Visible Measures … a heroic time of unfettered innovation similar to the early days of railroads, when anyone could lay down track and buy an engine and there wasn’t even a standard width. Amazing times that, each year, as the coverlet of time draws over us, become less vivid and abundant.
We’d like to preserve those years, as historians of technology and observers of the mighty entrepreneur. We also just like advertising and think it’s unjustly deprecated but those who do not understand its role in commerce — and who’ve never worked in that beautiful maelstrom of art, science and sales that is the modern ad business.
Each week, we will interview a person who participated in some way in the ad tech industry during those years: entrepreneurs, data jockeys, salespeople, suits, engineers. Anyone who will talk to us. We’d love to hear your stories.
If you’d like to share, please email Marty: martykihn at gmail dot com.
