Tracking the first major expansion of digital advertising agencies is an exercise in both clarity and frustration. The year 2000 stands out as a curious milestone—far enough into the internet era that “online advertising” had become a recognizable industry, but still early enough that definitions were fluid, and the numbers rarely aligned as one might hope. ISIC 7310, “Advertising,” is the logical statistical gateway for the sector, though it remains broad enough to include everything from print campaign specialists to media-buying shops. For anyone seeking to isolate the first generation of digital-focused agencies, the journey begins here, with a certain resignation to ambiguity.
The initial task is to assemble a complete list of firms registered under ISIC 7310 in the target geography for 2000. The raw list, whether drawn from business registries or trade association membership rolls, invariably spans a wide spectrum. Some agencies dabbled in digital as a sideline, others leaned in fully, staking their reputation—and, sometimes, their entire existence—on the rise of the web. Distinguishing between these is seldom simple. Most official business descriptions from the period do not dwell on channel strategy. It’s not unusual to find an agency billing itself as “full-service,” a phrase that, then as now, means everything and nothing.
For a finer filter, analysts can turn to a mix of contemporaneous press coverage, archived agency websites, and conference records. The language of the era is revealing. Agencies boasting about “banner campaign expertise,” “email marketing,” or “dot-com partnerships” are more likely to have built a business around digital media. Case studies and client rosters, sometimes featured in trade publications, provide additional evidence. Agencies working with early e-commerce brands or prominent tech clients are especially likely to have invested in digital capabilities ahead of the pack.
Matching this list against expenditure data presents another challenge. Online ad spend figures from 2000 are available—if inconsistently—from industry groups, market research firms, and sometimes from the agencies themselves, at least in aggregate. Few agencies published revenue from digital work as a standalone figure; most blended it with other campaign revenue, or offered only vague hints about the channel mix. Where available, analyst reports and investor briefings shed a bit more light, sometimes noting the rise in “interactive media” or “internet advertising” as a line item.
To correlate agency activity with internet user growth, a multi-step approach is helpful. National statistics offices and international organizations such as the ITU generally provide annual internet user counts at the country or even regional level. Overlaying this data with reported online ad spends—normalizing by population or household, if possible—creates a set of rough ratios. In periods of rapid user growth, online ad spend often climbs more steeply, driven by both agency innovation and advertiser experimentation. There are exceptions: in some markets, user adoption outpaced the willingness of advertisers to follow, often for reasons tied to broadband penetration, credit card usage, or simple cultural lag.
Patterns emerge that are as much about agency adaptation as about advertiser demand. Agencies with strong digital credentials grew faster, not only in revenue but in headcount, market share, and sometimes reputation. There is, however, a persistent blur: many traditional shops added a digital arm without truly changing their core business. Others, started by web designers or media buyers with a digital-first mentality, never bothered with the legacy vocabulary of the sector. Some changed names, merged, or vanished in the dot-com bust that soon followed, making the work of mapping even more ambiguous.
No single indicator—be it ISIC code, press mention, or spending ratio—captures the full reality of digital media’s emergence. But by layering these imperfect signals, and accepting a certain amount of overlap and redundancy, it’s possible to trace the shape of an industry in transition. The intersection of agency registration, online ad spending, and internet user data doesn’t yield a perfectly symmetrical picture, but it does provide enough structure to see how the early digital agencies carved out their own territory in a rapidly changing media landscape.