Welcome the The "First" Banner Ad

Yes, this site is supposed to look this way. After all, this is what most web pages looked like back on October 27, 1994 -- the day that Wired Magazine flipped the switch on its first website, hotwired.com, starting a revolution in web content and advertising that still reverberates today.



This site is dedicated to showing off one of the ads that ran on that site. No, it wasn't the "first" as there were a handful of other ads that ran on various sections of hotwired.com. This site is also here to tell the story of how that ad came to be, how it succeeded beyond anything we had imagined, and how we tried to set an example for how corporations could communicate with their audiences.



This site launched on October 27, 2014. It is being constantly updated, so please check back again soon for more. In the meantime, get started by clicking your mouse in the banner ad above explore these other options: