The year was 2000, the final, halcyon days of the Internet boom, and the St. Louis Rams played the Tennessee Titans in the Super Bowl, a moment that will be forever remembered as the tech bubble’s Waterloo. Take ego-rich 20-year-old CEOs, gravity-defiant stock prices, confused consumers, revolutionary technologies and half-baked business plans, give all the Doogie Howsers buckets of funny money to herald their arrival on the national scenes and you’ve got a billion dollar boondoggle: Super Bowl XXXIV. Football fans got a heavy dose of fool’s gold fever that day: 20 percent of the 61 television spots were for Internet companies who spent an average of $2.2 million for 30-second spots, amounting to more than $40 million dollars of stockholder cash and not-so-hard-won venture capital. The startups hoped that Super Bowl exposure would burn their URLs into the brains of consumers, but most viewers were left with only vague memories of singing sock-puppets, chimpanzees dancing to “La Cucaracha” and cats being herded like cattle by cowboys to promote something or other, while the businesses quietly disappeared into the ether. Pets.com, Epidemic.com, Lifeminders.com, Ourbeginning.com, Netpliance.com, E-stamp.com, e1040.com, OnMoney.com are al dead and gone, forgotten as the score of the game (St. Louis 23, Tennessee 16).
The following year, during the 2001 Super Bowl, one of the tech boom survivors, Etrade.com, hit us with this awesome commercial.