AOL Free-Trial CDs

Jan Brandt, AOL's brilliant (or infamous) chief of marketing, orchestrated one of the most aggressive direct-marketing campaigns ever conceived. Free-trial CDs appeared everywhere: stuffed into magazines, dumped into mailboxes by the millions, handed out at retail checkout lines, and inexplicably packed inside gourmet food shipments. By some estimates, her campaign accounted for half of all CDs manufactured worldwide at its peak. The strategy was ruthless and it worked: AOL grew from roughly 200,000 subscribers to over 20 million by 2000, and by 1997 nearly half of all US internet households connected through it.

The campaign's genius was the sound design. That screeching dial-up modem handshake and the cheerful "You've Got Mail!" (voiced by Elwood Edwards, who recorded it in his living room in 1989 for just $200) became synonymous with logging on. By the early 2000s, the CD blitz became so ubiquitous that protest groups emerged; a campaign called "No More AOL CDs" collected over 410,000 discs between 2001 and 2007 with the aim of dumping a million of them back on AOL's doorstep — a symbolic act of resistance that captured the internet's growing frustration with the deluge.