The first online ad ever came out in September, 1994 on Hotwired, and ever since then ad agencies have been devising ways to find new ways to reap off of this great medium. In the last 12 years, online advertising has been such a huge part of our lives.
Let’s look at the timeline for the history of online advertising:
- The origin of online advertising dates all the way back to 1978 when Gary Thuerk, “the father of spam,” sent out the first spam email campaign. Thuerk, who was the marketing manager at the Digital Equipment Corporation, pulled a recipient list of 400 users from the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet). His goal was to reach out to West Coast technological enthusiasts to invite them to a product demonstration of the new Decsystem-20 by Digital.
- The next step forward for online advertising came in 1984 when Prodigy was invented. Prodigy was a user-friendly online service – the first to provide access to news, sports, email, bulletin boards, weather, and, advertising, all in one place. It was the future of online activity, and it caught on like wildfire. Big names like IBM and Sears recognized the potential in Prodigy and backed the initiative. In exchange, their ads were displayed at the bottom of every Prodigy page. While these ads were unclickable, they provided a huge opportunity to reach millions of the service’s users.
- Prodigy paved the way for online advertising to burst onto the scene. The first commercial website to sell clickable banner ads was Global Network Navigator (GNN) in 1993.
- In 1994, Hotwired debuted as the first commercial web-based magazine. Like any print magazine, they had a large inventory of ad space to offer to big name companies. Hotwired was also a pioneer on the banner ad frontier.
- In 1997, GeoCities’ Information Architect and Technical Project Manager, John Shiple, was faced with the challenge of finding a way to make advertisements more effective than traditional banner ads. His solution: pop-up ads that open a new window when a user tries to access a website, making them nearly impossible to ignore.
- Online advertising revenues hit $1.92 billion in 1998, more than double the $907 million spent in 1997. Total online ad revenues in 1998 surpassed the $1.58 billion spent on outdoor advertising the same year.
Cut to today when we have thousands of online ads, which each company creating individual consumer profile dedicated to each person online. Let’s take a brief look at how advertising online works today:
Text-based ads
May display separately from a web page’s primary content, or they can be embedded by hyperlinking individual words or phrases to advertiser’s websites. Text ads may also be delivered through email marketing or text message marketing. They often render faster than graphical ads and can be harder for ad-blocking software to block.
Social media marketing
Is commercial promotion conducted through social media websites. Many companies promote their products by posting frequent updates and providing special offers through their social media profiles.
Content marketing
Is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including blogs, news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, and more.
CPC (Cost Per Click) or PPC (Pay Per Click)
Means advertisers pay each time a user clicks on the ad. CPC advertising works well when advertisers want visitors on their sites, but it’s a less accurate measurement for advertisers looking to build brand awareness. CPC’s market share has grown each year since its introduction, eclipsing CPM to dominate two-thirds of all online advertising compensation methods.
Pop Up Ads
On your Facebook or Twitter feed always happen to feature something that you are interested in Today, we have companies that follow your every movement on the internet. They look into your interests and sites you navigate to create a very organized profile containing all your likes, dislikes, opinions and whatever you have kept public on your social media. They display only the ads they think you will be interested in and will most likely click on. Evolution of social media and online advertising has come to an amazing period, where for any business to flourish, regardless of whether they are big or small, need social media, and online advertising. Thorough knowledge are the very first steps to success.
Considering that most marketing involves some form of published media, it is almost (though not entirely) redundant to call ‘content marketing’ anything other than simply ‘marketing’. There are, of course, other forms of marketing (in-person marketing, telephone-based marketing, word of mouth marketing, etc.) where the label is more useful for identifying the type of marketing. However, even these are usually merely presenting content that they are marketing as information in a way that is different from traditional print, radio, TV, film, email, or web media.
