The Nifty 90s

The 1990s were an interesting time for the Walt Disney World Resort. With Disney-MGM Studios making its debut, so much of the resort's advertising featured characters and stories that could be found in this park. While there were still no set in stone advertising campaigns like we have today, it was during the '90s that we would begin to see some serious trends and rebranding throughout the resort as a whole in addition to its marketing techniques.

Image: Brittany DiCologero

However, the most important shift here was the turn back to families as the target audience for Walt Disney World. View any ad put out by Disney for the theme parks in the 90s, and you'll likely come across a quick story featuring a family going to the parks together, with the parents ecstatic seeing how happy the children are, and more than likely with at least the kids if not the whole family meeting Mickey Mouse. The Disney Renaissance, or the sort of rebirth that the company's animated film division experienced in the '90s, definitely helped lay the groundwork for the types of guests who would be looking into visiting the parks during this time. To put it lightly, kids who grew up in the 90s would grow up with Disney in a whole new and exciting way, and the marketing department was very keenly aware of this.

However, beginning at the turn of the millenium, Disney began offering a number of specific marketing campaigns that you might remember by name...

The Millennium Celebration

Image: Disney

The Millennium Celebration, which began in 1999 obviously focused on the upcoming Millennium, and followed the usual 90s style of all members of the family enjoying the parks together. The events for the celebration were culminated in Epcot, and many of the ads for the years 1999 to 2000 feature children reveling in World Showcase. Whether or not kids actually enjoyed this part of the park as much as the ads made them out to is of course up for debate, however it is definitely worth noting the shift in the target audience here. (And in case you're unaware, that eyesore —I mean, wand and Mickey hand that topped Spaceship Earth were actually added during this celebration and were originally meant to be temporary...)

The Millennium Celebration marked the first time that new entertainment offerings were added to existing areas of the park to promote specific events. During this time, a space in Epcot known as the Millennium Village, now World Showcase and only used for special events, was open to guests visiting different expos, and the evening Tapestry of Nations parade could be seen from all around World Showcase, Of course, there was that wand that was added to Spaceship Earth as well, but we don't need to talk about that...

Image: DisneyWith the early 2000s around the corner, it would be some time before guests would see another specific promotion active within the theme park world. While we may never know for sure why the Millennium Celebration came and went without being followed by another event for the next six years, we can speculate a couple of reasons: One potential reason for this is that the company was simply testing out the yearly promotion idea, and nothing was set in stone yet. While the Millennium Celebration was the first real promotional event at the parks, there had been celebrations in the past for park anniversaries and birthdays that were just not on the same scale.

Another, likely more plausible reason in my opinion, has to do with the decline of the tourism industry in general in the early 2000s. The economic downturn that followed 9/11 had a great impact on the travel and tourism industry across the country, and it should come as no surprise that Walt Disney World's attendance was also impacted by this. During the early 2000s, park hours were cut, budget cuts were made all around the resort, and Disney even halted construction on a new resort near Pop Century, that would much later become the Art of Animation Resort. Though we may never know for certain what exactly accounted for the lull in Disney's yearly promotion, the post 9/11 state of the tourism industry is likely our best guess.