The San Francisco Chronicle described yesterday how the online ad and marketing industry is booming again 5 years after the bubble burst. This topic along with the “death” of the 30-second TV commercial has been quite hot in the past few months but I particularly liked two things in this article.

First this quote:
"What a ride," said Nelson, who at the peak in 2000 had 1,200 employees with several offices overseas. "We went from a couple of card tables in a bedroom to going public, being worth billions of dollars, nearly crashing, and here we are growing like mad again," he said.

Then the fact that recruiting is difficult because so many people got burned and might not be ready to jump on the so called WEB2.0 rollercoaster car (sorry for the metaphor, I was in Dysneyland Paris last Friday with the MBA class of 2006). I guess most people also found less hype but more secure jobs meanwhile.

So, advertising soap for P&G on the web is nothing but a good old fashion soap opera: nothing like a love/hate relationship to keep the show going on.


Note: According to the SF Chronicle, "Jonathan Nelson [is] the 37-year-old chairman of Organic Inc. in San Francisco, a Web site development and Internet advertising agency founded in 1993."