TELENORDIA | INTERNET | 1997
The Tragedy Caused by Slow Internet / TELENORDIA "INTERNET"
It was 1997, the early dawn of the internet, back when images loaded "from the top down," line by line.
The problem
Back in 1997, internet speeds were nowhere near what they are today. With dial-up connections, it could take tens of seconds just to load a single image. Telenordia was a Swedish phone and internet service provider founded in 1995, and in that early internet market, it needed to make the case for why speed mattered.
The idea
A woman receives a photo from a man she met online. The top half of the image loads first, showing a handsome face, and she gets so excited that she calls a friend to tell her the news—then rushes out the door before the rest of the picture loads. But the bottom half of the image, the part she never saw, showed an overweight man: the actual person she was about to go meet. The ad captures the "incomplete information" caused by slow internet connections, using the universal situation of a date to make it land.
What happened
The ad became popular with both viewers and the ad industry, and won a Gold Lion at Cannes.
Afterthought
Looking at it now, it's pure nostalgia, but for people in 1997, this must have been a very real fear. What strikes me is the sheer strength of the idea: taking a technical product benefit and turning it into something everyone can relate to, that universal anxiety of "they looked different when I actually met them." And when I think that something like this probably really did happen back then, it gets kind of bittersweet.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 1997
