elfs | Old Ad Agencies Are Old

Back when I worked for CompuServe, I was frequently rented out by my bosses to advertising agencies. I contracted as the backend guy for several, the most prominent of which, Saltmine Creative, I will always remember as the agency that loved the font Fiesta far, far too much.

This weekend, while cleaning up, I found a file with over a thousand URLs to other agencies active in 1998.

I was not surprised to discover that only about 8% of those URLs resolved to the same agencies. I would expect that. What did surprise me, more than anything, was that, of those agencies that were still around, most of them still looked the same. Of those that used Flash, more than half of them were still using the same flash app they had in 1998! It's been 13 years and yet the design sensibilities and graphic capabilities of these agencies hasn't seen an upgrade in 13 years.

That blows my mind. I want to say "If it works, stick with it," but Gnomist and Type Collective were cool back in 1998. Now, they look like poorly aging college students.

Even more sadly, some have gone backwards. Design Is Kinky used to have a new look every year; now they're just a Wordpress blog of things they're up to. A very nicely designed one, but not the impressarios of the 1990s.

Saddest of all are the pages marked "We're renovating. Be back soon," with HTTP "last update" dates in 2004. There were a few of those. TomoTomo has the same graphic it had 5 years ago, with "New site coming soon."