The Big Bang, an agency perspective on Flash

About a decade ago, the Internet exploded into a brand new canvas on which you could sell anything to anyone, anywhere. The underdog and entrepreneur suddenly had an affordable way to broadcast their message to just about as many people as the incumbent corporations could. How? Well, frankly... people were so mesmerized with the new household technology that they were willing to click on just about anything. There's a resounding irony found in the humorous website that once claimed to be “the end” of the Internet. As if to say “that’s all folks, you found every last page.” The general public had Internet fever so bad, it seemed as if they were literally participating in an endless virtual treasure hunt. As people's attention went to the Internet, business had to follow.

Enter the overnight success. The 49'rs of the Internet were taking over the headlines. Every business was now being told to get online, even when it made absolutely no sense for them to do so. The assumption was that if you got your business on the Internet you just might strike it rich like those other guys, but more importantly you could at lease keep up with the Joneses. I could write an entire article on what the Internet did to global and local commerce, in fact my lead developer wrote his college thesis on the matter at my suggestion. I will assume for now we all saw (all of us over 25) together how the Internet dramatically devalued billions of dollars of physical sales channels and made regional competition a thing of the past, practically overnight.

How then does an established company with millions, possibly billions invested in brand recognition and physical sales channels compete with these annoying rouge outfits on the Internet? By doing the same thing… only doing it better. Now, web companies were challenged with gaining back market share or being first to bring an offline product into cyberspace. With more money behind them they didn't have to settle for status quo, impressive budgets almost the likes of television ads were being pumped into the Internet. Now the underdog has some competition, as fortune 500 attempts to stomp them out the only way they know how in a medium they hardly understood… brute force... entertainment.

Well, it doesn’t get much more brute force then Flash 3 or 4. With this tool one could practically hypnotize a site visitor into clicking around and never leaving. Impressive animations started popping up all over the Internet. The industry once again had a way to separate out the big boys, kind of. Not everyone could afford to make Flash websites. The elite (and a handful of self taught animators) had their throne back. The fastest moving, most interactive and coolest looking websites were getting all the glory. Now that the market had this shinny new object it started turning advertising on its head. Brand new companies made up of kids were rolling large if they had Flash chops. The addiction continued and a whole new virtual industry was born with the mantra "who had the best Flash site?" We all wanted more, it was unstoppable. With this craze, came the inevitable poor decision making that led people to do such things as navigate sites, sell products, deliver content, or even create content all within the Flash plug-in.

Macromedia (the makers of Flash before the Adobe buyout) stood up and did everything in their power to meet the needs experience website hungry people (at the time myself included, sure… why not, right?) who also had to deliver some content with the pretty animations. I guess the idea was that if people were going to use a pinwheel for a fan, Macromedia would try to make it blow as much air as possible. None of us had time to evaluate why we expected such things from a plug-in, we just knew that the client wanted sales, but they wanted to be sexy. HTML was considered fairly unsexy at the time.