ABSTRACT
In many ways, the advertising industry’s ambiguous treatment of the internet reflected the reference points that have been used to make sense of it. With convergence and integrated marketing communications both encouraging the advertising industry to move away from the siloed approach to marketing, many in the industry began to see the internet as something more than the information superhighway. The arrival of electronic mail in the advertising industry went largely undocumented in the trade press. The attitude of advertising agencies towards websites was in many ways little different to that of their clients. With only a minority of agencies willing to embrace the new medium, the advertising industry—notably the creative agencies—effectively lost an opportunity to reinvent itself and to reassert the importance of advertising within the marketing hierarchy. Over the course of the 1990s, the advertising industry’s response to the digital revolution had been characterised by its ambivalence.
