Happy Birthday! Banner ads are 15 years old.

Time flies when you punching that god damned monkey, it feels like it was just yesterday we said Happy birthday on the banner ads tenth birthday and showed off the horrendous AT&T banner ad that ran in Hotwired at the time.

Adgrunt ottowt shared some info on that ad in the tenth anniversary thread.

For the record: the "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE?" ad was created for Modem Media/AT&T by TANGENT Design/Communications of Westport, CT.
Principal Creators:
Copy Writer: Joe McCambley, Creative Director, Modem Media
Graphic Design: Craig Kanarick, Associate, TANGENT Design (pre-razorfish)
Executive Producer & Art Director: Otto Timmons, VP, TANGENT Design
Contributors:
Brent Hood, CEO, TANGENT Design
Research Intern, Tangent Design (I will have to track his name down)
The Client, AT&T (a great guy and ditto on tracking the name down)
Although we had the most popular ad on Hotwired (according to Brian and Matt...) there were at least five or six other banner ads that launched at the same time and they too should get credit for being "first". I can remember Club Med, AT&T, ZIMA. Last but not least, O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator, GNN, started accepting paid advertising at the same time (one banner ad on the home page, as I recall).

For the 15th AdAge has joined in to celebrate and they dug up screenshots of Hotwired and Frank D'Angelo reminisces about the digital advertising revolution he witnessed firsthand.

Four of our then-clients placed ad banners as part of that first campaign, MCI, Volvo, Club Med and 1-800-Collect. (The other two advertisers were AT&T and Zima.) Keep in mind, this was 1994; the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was less than a year old (soon to be replaced by Netscape Explorer), and Web access? Purely dial-up, 24.4kps if you were lucky, meaning these ads took a while to load. The online U.S. population? Two million, if that.
These "original six" were the first brands to take a leap of faith and place advertising in the unchartered "cyberspace" territory. But several didn't know they were taking it until after the fact. Corporate America was still largely unfamiliar with the graphical web, so we didn't even try to sell the concept. We decided to commit agency media and development dollars to place client banner ads on HotWired without clients' prior consent or knowledge. The way he saw it was if they liked it, they would be happy to pay us and if not, that was OK too; but at least the agency would get a running start at exploring this new exciting medium that was on course to change all of our (professional) lives.

Spot Otto in the adage comments as well. :)