Verizon DSL

Verizon came to us a bit reluctant. Not reluctant because they didn't want to run with us, but reluctant because they were targeting dial-up users and wanted to do something that would have impact and catch the attention of the users. The dilemma is that most ad executions are very graphic heavy and either take too long to load or don't load at all, and thus would be ineffective. I spoke to our Member Services team about what type of complaints they were getting from dial-up users and the biggest thing was that the ads were making the pages take too long to load for them. It was obvious from there: make very light ads that would load quickly and speak directly to those users. I thought back to the dial-up days of the early 90s. Remember what else was a popular computer activity back then? ASCII art! So I worked with one of the designers directly to create a series of fun ads calling out dial-up users in some interstitial units. The click-thru rates were tremendous for these ads, targeted specifically to dial-up users. Verizon was very happy with the results.