Some of my works in the field of online advertising from the past.

It all started a very long time ago — back when Rambler was the No. 1 search engine, and bottles of Royal spirit were still sold in stores.
The Internet was just beginning to take shape. There were no proper traffic-exchange systems yet, so everyone swapped banners with everyone — especially those tiny 88x31-pixel buttons that were all the rage.

The first commercial placements on the Russian web — for real money — appeared around 1998. One of the earliest ad campaigns was for Olivetti, on the InfoArt and IXBT websites, which then had an audience of about 5,000 unique visitors per day. The placement was handled by the advertising agency “Present,” where I worked at the time.
The main banner format of that era was 468x60 px — not by accident, but because it matched the horizontal resolution of monitors back then.
Banners larger than 15 KB were considered bad manners: they loaded too slowly over dial-up modems with their characteristic crackling sound.

There were few web studios in Russia. Apart from the “one-you-know-who,” the leaders were RusArt (later known as Individ), Gorod Info, and X Project. It was a true age of experimentation — no one really knew anything, there were no textbooks, and new ideas were born every day.
For example, Boyko once tested the clickability of different parts of the female body and managed to achieve a CTR of 32%. Ovchinnikov somehow squeezed more than 100 frames into a single GIF while keeping it under 13 KB.

With the arrival of Macromedia Flash, the horizons for creativity expanded dramatically. Now it became possible to create mini-movies inside a banner, with a classic storyline — setup, action, and resolution. Vector graphics took almost no space: objects could be moved and scaled without increasing the file size, and there was no longer any need to painfully compress images to 16 colors.
In the mid-2000s, new Flash-banner formats appeared — ScreenGlide and FrontLine — some of which even won Cannes Lions awards.

This lasted until the rise of contextual advertising from Google and Yandex, where smart targeting made it possible to show ads to the right users without spending money on creative production.
As smartphones and mobile devices became widespread, the need for media banners declined rapidly. Flash technology was not supported on iOS at all, and as a result, colorful animated banners survived only as part of high-end image advertising.
The ActionScript language used in Flash became a niche for professional developers. Interest in Flash faded noticeably — fresh creative ideas in this field had long since disappeared.
In my last year working at a major publishing house, I made only about ten banners — while earlier that amount used to be produced in a single week.

I no longer make banners — and I quit smoking too!
The phone number listed is outdated, the contact form doesn’t work, and the site is optimized for 800?600 resolution. Welcome back to the early 2000s :)
(Ctrl + help)