Working at an Internet advertising agency is like staffing the terminal ward at the county hospital. Companies come to us hoping we can make them successful. But their problem isn't something advertising can solve -- the problem is that these companies are doomed.

When the Internet Gold Rush started, any company with a dream and a URL could get VC funding. Now, we're in the phase where the wheat is being separated from the chaff ­ and it's becoming pretty obvious which companies are the chaff.

My agency (I'm a copywriter at one of those small, hip, post-1996 Silicon Alley boutiques with a well-designed office and a fancy sans-serif logo) is bombarded by calls from companies whose names are prefaced by lower-case i's or e's, begging us to spend their advertising budgets. An investor has entrusted millions of dollars into the hands of an old frat brother with good hair and the business savvy one gets from reading back issues of Wired, and they need us to devise the most efficient strategy to blow it.

In a marketplace completely saturated with advertising clutter, .com logic holds that the only way to get heard is to shout louder than everyone else. And that's the reason why ad agencies are the ones really cashing in on the Internet craze. A well-thought out advertising strategy has become irrelevant -- just take their money, sink it into a huge ad campaign, and hope that's enough to get them through the next round of funding so we can repeat the process (and collect our commission) all over again.

Ultimately, we expect to transfer many of our clients from the terminal ward to a debt collection service. But until the day we find a patient's corporate URL being auctioned off on eBay, we keep on smiling and reassuring them that everything will be ok. Because after all, the longer they're on life support, the longer we can bill them.

Dave Prager . 10/00 (Artbyte Magazine)

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