Digital Marketing, or the promotion of services, events, and products, is still young enough to be considered new to one generation and yet another generation hasn’t lived without it. While the older generation recognized that the rise of the internet opened a whole new avenue for businesses to attract new customers and they certainly capitalized on that opportunity, it’s almost stereotypical that much of the younger generation only knows that it exists but not how it came to be.
The 90’s brought the innovation of many new products that would continue to evolve into the 21st century. This included the DVD, text messaging, Tickle Me Elmo, as well as the World Wide Web. Avantika Monnappa does a great job of explaining it, according to her, “The term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s. The digital age took off with the coming of the internet and the development of the Web 1.0 platform.” Search engines became the official beginning of this marketing especially when banner ads were introduced. Banner ads allowed companies to show themselves off while audiences browsed search engines. With the arrival of the first search engine ‘Archie’ in 1990, others like Yahoo, Google, and MSN followed as well as smaller search engines that have since died out. So, banner ads picked up, email marketing began filling people’s mailboxes, the 90’s became the start of it all.
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Myspace arrived in the early 2000’s and digital marketing grew exponentially. Businesses and artists could develop their own social media pages and advertise their products just by posting it on their page. This skyrocketed when it only took a handful of people sending the advertisements they liked to their friends and family, and when they did the same it wasn’t long before people on opposite sides of the planet to have seen the same advertisement! While newspapers and magazines still survived, it didn’t take much longer for businesses to acknowledge digital marketing as the method to utilize.
Smartphones like the iPhone and Android brought another surge to the rise of digital marketing. When consumers could reach their target audience wherever they went, possibilities flourished. Other newer arrivals like Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services meant more opportunities for advertisements. Nowadays it’s almost impossible to go a day without seeing an advertisement of some sort, and despite the fact that they too arrived in the 90’s, cookies have made it unique for each user. One just has to search for something, and advertisements will start arriving for that specific product or service on their social media page, in their search results, and on ads that appear before the videos they watch.
At first, there wasn’t much confidence for digital advertising. People simply didn’t believe the internet would kick off. The World Wide Web made sure that would happen and now digital marketing occurs in everyday life. Jobs exist solely to manage social media pages and push ad campaigns to target audiences and it can be easy and simple of enough to develop in the palm of one’s hand.
