Mary S. Butler

I moved to New York four years ago for a job. No, not just a job. An incredible opportunity.

I had been recruited by Forbes.com to launch its “luxury automotive portal.” As the first, and for a few months the only, employee, I initially had to “borrow” resources from the already quite busy Forbes.com team. Thanking all of the people who pitched in would require me to publish a list of names nearly as lengthy as the FDC masthead.  However, there are several Forbes.com colleagues who do deserve to be mentioned individually — Creative Director Jeff Bauer and then Director of Software Development Steve Paelet — who both gave generously of their time during that hectic period.

It’s amazing how much you can get done if you put in four-and-a-half months of 80- to 100-hour workweeks and aren’t afraid to hire people who are smarter than you. Sleep deprivation, and the efforts of a talented and equally dedicated staff, including Art Director Kacy Colson, Editor Matthew de Paula and Software Engineer Lorraine Sawicki, among others, enabled us to launch ForbesAutos.com in late April, a few days ahead of its scheduled May 1, 2005 launch.

The site’s target audience was affluent online consumers in-market for a new car or truck. At the time of the site’s launch, the average luxury consumer spent nearly $47,000 for each new automobile purchased, according to Unity Marketing’s Luxury Report 2005, and Forbes.com had a number of advertisers — including Audi, Acura, BMW, Cadillac, Chrysler, Infiniti,  Jaguar, Land Rover, Lexus, Mazda, Nissan, Porsche and Volvo — who wanted to reach this audience. By the time the site launched, Chief Advertising Officer Bill Flatley and his team had already sold all available inventory for the rest of the year. It is no wonder that so many online marketers and publishers assumed the double-digit quarterly growth in online advertising was going to continue into the next decade.

Of course, we all know how that story ended. As eMarketer reported on Friday, “the long-time top ad spending vertical had the steepest year-over-year drop of any of the top 10 industries tracked by TNS Retail Forward during the first half of 2008.”

So, it was with great sadness that I learned the entire staff of ForbesAutos.com, many of whom I had hired, had been let go last Friday.

The site is still up for now — most likely to fulfill display ad commitments through the end of the year — but, of course, no new content has been posted since the staff was dismissed.