Exponential is again the premier sponsor of the UK IAB’s blue riband event, Engage 2014. It’s the tenth year of this event – the first featured Bill Gates, Sir Martin Sorrell and Lord Puttnam – and, this year, the IAB is asking its sponsors to have a look back of the last decade of internet advertising.

As part of this effort, it asked our CMO Phil Buxton to outline his top ten digital campaigns of the last ten years. And here they are:

Think about it: ‘the top ten digital campaigns of the last ten years’. When you do, you start to see that great online campaigns still don’t live in the mind the way great TV work or even outdoor work does. This is a function of the limitless fragmentation of media online. Millions of ‘channels’ means fragmented audiences means less opportunity to get to us all in one shot.

That choice also means media owners and advertisers can try to interrupt us with their messages online but the price they pay in lost audiences is higher. All in all, it means remembering great online campaigns is a tough ask and it’s why the list below is filled more with symbolic work – campaigns that are representative of a time or a shift or some of the keys to successful digital thinking and execution. And it shows that to be remembered these days, you have to think so much harder and deeper than a big-budget 30-second TV spot.

My top 10 digital campaigns of the decade

1. The first advertiser-funded banner ad: HotWired, the web version of Wired magazine, carried a banner ad for AT&T by agency The Wonderfactory in 1994. The copy went ‘Have you clicked your mouse right here? You will.’

2. Ironic then that my favourite banner campaign was by Glue Media (as it was then) for Virgin Money circa 2005 because they made the ad non-clickable. You see, if it really is a brand awareness campaign, why would you be measuring clicks?

3. What we might call a boring one, except that Dare’s multi-award winning email campaign for the AA offered sequential ads that totally worked. Didn’t convert first time? Have a discount. Still no? Have a bigger one. Not pretty but oh so effective.

4. The age of content-only driven, social media-enabled advertising arrived in digital when Cadbury’s threw a gorilla suit on a bloke to mime-drum to Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’. My digital equivalent of BBH’s Flat Eric for Levi’s.

5. And, likewise, I remember the man beating up the bear to steal his salmon for John West. It was in 2006 and is my first memory of a ‘viral video’ (that is, a video that got shared a lot).

6. And I recall Aussie beer brand Carlton Draught achieving similar sharing joy with ‘Big Ad’, a brilliant parody of the peak of big-budget TV spots by the likes of British Airways.

7. So how about a new one? The no make-up selfie social campaign for Cancer Research is said to have raised £8m and is the reason so many people have been drenched in ice water lately.

8. The first ‘integrated’ campaign. The word bandied around even more than engagement might actually have been successfully manifested in Dove’s ‘real beauty’ campaign when digital goodies were as core as the TV work.

9. The story goes that Pizza Hut in America built an application so that World of Warcraft-type gamers (the game was Everquest II) could check a menu, order a pizza and have it delivered to their door without leaving the game. Even better, the game alerted them when the pizza arrived. Just think about the complete brilliance of that idea. Proof it existed here and here.

10. And then I can’t help thinking about all those blue chip companies that built an ‘office’ in Second Life. All that glitters…

See the original version of this article and find out more about Engage 2014 at http://www.iabuk.net/blog/engage-2014-ten-of-the-best-exponential#JfDiVZoamQerRwSg.99