AOL Hangs Up Dial Up

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Do you need the internet or the phone?

Before broadband, internet access was via dial-up service over phone lines. If you wanted to get online, it meant no calls could come in.

America Online provided that dial-up service, and by the late 90s, AOL was the primary path to the internet.

AOL announced it will discontinue its dial-up offering at the end of this month.

The move doesn’t affect a lot of customers (just 0.1% as of 2022). But it signals the definitive end of a crucial era in the history of the internet – and one of the most successful direct marketing campaigns of all time.

You’ve Got CDs

In the early days of the web, many would-be customers didn’t really understand what the internet was or how it worked.

Enter Jan Brandt, AOL’s chief marketing officer in the 90s.

AOL trailed other internet companies, and Brandt was tasked with boosting subscribers.

She decided to promote the revolutionary new technology through an old-school sales approach – direct marketing.

Brandt and AOL offered a gateway to the internet first through floppy disks, then CDs – lots and lots of CDs.

The company spent $250,000 on a campaign mailing small packages to potential customers. The package contained a disc with software offering 15 hours of free AOL internet service.

The campaign succeeded even beyond Brandt’s wildest expectations – over 10% of prospects signed up.

“And remember, this isn’t people who are saying, ‘I think I want this.’ These are people who are taking the disc, putting it into the computer, signing up, and giving us a credit card,” Brandt said in a podcast.

Soon, the discs and CDs were everywhere from cereal boxes and Super Bowl seats to Blockbuster Video stores and Omaha Steaks packages.

Today, they’re in the Smithsonian, marking their significance in the world of marketing and technology.  

The CDs eventually came to be thought of as junk mail. But that was arguably after they served their initial purpose – creating an easy and exciting path to understanding and using the internet.

Here’s Brandt again: “It was my absolute belief that you could not send someone a package in the mail—and I don’t mean an envelope, I mean a package that you could feel—and not open it.”