If you lived through the 90s, you definitely remember your mailbox being stuffed with AOL free trial CDs. Most of us just used them as coffee coasters or frisbees, but the actual scale of this marketing campaign is borderline terrifying.
Driven by AOL marketing executive Jan Brandt, the company spent hundreds of millions of dollars every single year on raw disc manufacturing and postage. It became the most expensive junk mail operation in tech history, and incredibly, it worked—acquiring millions of subscribers and completely dominating the birth of the consumer internet. At the absolute peak of this campaign, over half of all CDs manufactured on the entire planet were dedicated to AOL free trials. With physical media slowly dying out today, we will literally never see a physical marketing stunt of this magnitude ever again.
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