The The I'm your host Brian McCullough.

This is Chapter 3, Supplemental Episode 2, an interview with Jan Brandt.

Jan Brandt is a legend in the world of marketing.

She single-handedly led the famous AOL carpet bombing campaign that put millions of

AOL trial discs and CDs into everything from magazines to popcorn boxes to banks.

AOL was able to leap to the front of the online pack over competitors such as CompiServe and Prodigy largely on the success of this

campaign.

Jan tells us about how this strategy developed, the thinking that went into it, and goes into great detail about

what worked and what didn't.

But she was also a very early AOL executive, so she is able to finally give us some fantastic

background about

AOL the company.

Its culture, its people, its visionaries, people like Steve Case.

And so she takes us from AOL's beginnings through its considerable growing pains, remember America on hold, its rise to dominance in the dot com era, and she even gives us her perspective on the legacy of the AOL Time Warner merger,

which we will be talking about in a future chapter. Jan Brandt, thanks for coming on the Internet History Podcast.

I'm happy to be here, thank you.

So at the risk of buttering you up right at the top, you're really a bit of a marketing legend and so I wondered if you could start off by giving us a bit of a background in terms of your education

you know getting into the marketing field who your influences and your mentors were that sort of thing?

Sure. I fell into the marketing world in one way. I think sometimes I think I came out of the womb marketing. I said that in later years, but in my undergraduate studies I was studying at Boston University School of Public Communications and really in journalism.

And we had a lot of free form kind of projects where we could sort of choose the discipline that we wanted to work in and one of my professors actually later became the dean pointed out to me that I kept doing projects in advertising and did I want to consider going

into advertising and marketing and I said, no, I really don't, that I did projects in that area because I wanted to understand something that was trying so hard to

control our lives and persuade us.

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