Interactive agencies were among the hottest stocks on the market in 1999, valued less like ad firms and more like the internet itself. Agency.com was one of the New York shops behind that craze. It built websites and online campaigns for major brands that had only just started thinking about the web. When it filed to go public in late 1999, one of its early backers was Omnicom, the advertising giant.

Design, Code and Marketing

Chan Suh and Kyle Shannon founded Agency.com in 1995, when few big companies had a website. They bet the web would need its own kind of agency, one that mixed design, technology and marketing in a way traditional ad firms could not. Omnicom invested early. The agency grew fast by winning big corporate clients and buying smaller interactive shops in the United States and Europe.

$3.35 and Back to Omnicom

Agency.com priced at $26 a share in December 1999, at the height of the interactive agency craze. When the dot-com market fell, corporate budgets for websites fell with it. In 2001 Seneca Investments, a vehicle formed by Omnicom and Pegasus Partners, took the agency private for $3.35 a share. It ran for years inside the Omnicom family before it merged into TBWA.

Cover: Moulin Rouge, La Goulue, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a Paris cabaret poster (advertising as art).