The Day of Reckoning

Stuart was indicative of a trend. Madison Avenue flexed creative muscles it hadn't used in 20 years during the Internet boom! Who can forget the Jujube commercial created for E*Trade by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners? A junior exec sits across from his boss, enumerating the reasons why he should get a raise. The boss is fixated on his bowl of Jujubes. The old man thinks to himself, "The blues and the reds are the kings and queens of Jujubes. The greens and the yellows are like peasants. Will there be a revolution one day?" He looks up and notices the young man waiting for an answer, so he picks up his bowl and offers, "Jujube?"

Captain Kirk slammed poetry for Priceline.com, Outpost.com shot gerbils through cannons, and Yahoo!, one of the few companies to survive the bursting bubble, still airs brilliant commercials today. But the Internet bubble did burst, and there came a day of reckoning ”the 2001 Super Bowl. Forty percent of the commercials aired during the 2000 Super Bowl were for emerging dot-coms that had gone belly-up! E*Trade marked the historic occasion with its classic Sergio Leone-esque "Invest Wisely" commercial. A monkey riding a donkey ambled down the center of an abandoned Western ghost town full of boarded-up storefronts of shuttered dot-coms. The monkey peered down, and what did he spot? The remains of the tattered, discarded Sock Puppet! A simple two-word voiceover resonated with the truth, "Invest wisely."