Brandt attributes the success to the base appeal of getting something for nothing. The biggest challenge was expanding the marketing spend to reach more people. Case credits the campaign with lifting the service from , subscribers to 25 million. Those CDs really did take over the country. Marketing manager Reggie Fairchild chimed in on the Quora thread to claim that in , AOL used the world's entire CD production capacity for several weeks.
We were logging in new subscribers at the rate of one every six seconds. As the internet changed, so did AOL's business strategy. The company transitioned from charging for hourly use to an unlimited model, and the rise of broadband further transformed the company.
By , AOL was still sending out a lot of CDs, but the massive churn of users was already becoming a problem in a broadband era. Was there a backlash to the CDs? Of course. But the backlash only happened because AOL's direct marketing was successful enough to be a major engine behind the dot-com boom.
After all, that junk mail really did help bring America online. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. If you lived in the United States in the s, you remember these. They started as 3. I got one just about every single day. If nothing else, it was ingenious marketing for AOL. While people eventually started bitching about getting spammed by the discs, most of those people probably also installed them at least once and checked out the service.
So how much did that cost AOL? In order to propel the world into the digital future, AOL first had to take a step back into the past. Eschewing the expensive TV commercials and marketing campaigns other web providers like Prodigy were running, AOL spread the word about its internet service through people's mailboxes.
The idea was the brainchild of Jan Brandt , the company's chief marketing officer. She was brought to AOL to increase the company's subscriber base, and her idea in was simple: Use the antiquated strategy of direct mail campaigns to get free trial discs—originally floppy and later CDs—straight into the hands of consumers.
This would, in theory, lead to a paying customer once that trial expired. In those days, people didn't really know what the internet was, so it was proving difficult to explain it succinctly through a commercial, billboard, or print ad. It was much more effective to let customers try it firsthand during a free , , or hour trial. Brandt talked about why the physical package was so important to the campaign in an interview on the Internet History Podcast :.
I felt that it was constitutionally impossible for someone to get a small box in the mail and not be inspired to open it. While most direct mail campaigns are lucky to get a two or three percent response rate, Brandt's idea yielded 10 percent.
People weren't just using the trials, they were signing up for AOL's services and becoming paid subscribers in droves.
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