The Evolution of Digital Marketing: From Traditional Tactics to AI-Driven Strategies

We're on the precipice of some amazing technologies. AI technologies allow us to monitor campaigns in real-time, test strategies, and optimize key aspects of digital marketing. So, how did we get here? Let's look back over the evolution of digital marketing. 

Banner Boom

In 1993, the first clickable web banners went live, and marketing has never been the same since - mostly. For years, banner advertising dominated, with companies vying for coveted ad spaces on popular websites and blogs. While today, most websites will feature maybe an ad on the top or side, with a mid-scroll ad for longer articles, in the early days, websites were full of banners, many of them animated, turning sites into a visual cacophony of motion and color. 

It wasn't always pretty. It was, however, familiar to both advertisers and consumers used to magazines and paper ads. 

Search Engine Optimization

The true revolution in digital marketing came in 1994 with the release of the first search engines, notably Yahoo and WebCrawler. Yahoo began as an online catalog of web pages, curated and maintained mostly by human operators. WebCrawler, meanwhile, was the first engine to use web crawler programs that would visit URLs and follow hyperlinks to create a searchable index of the pages. 

These web crawlers are why search engine optimization (SEO), as website creators wanted to ensure their websites would be easier to search and show up more often when people searched for specific terms. 

SEO Run Wild

In these early days, web crawlers relied heavily on metadata on a web page. This is the hidden text that web crawlers and other search engine algorithms can see but doesn't show up visibly on the web page itself. While reputable websites kept their metadata relevant to page topics, less scrupulous designers looking for a quick, easy way to increase rankings would include anything and everything popular at the time in their metadata, including celebrity names like Britney Spears, even though the terms had nothing to do with the site's content.

This practice led to changes in how search engines search and rank pages, with less reliance on metadata and more reliance on the actual content of the page itself. Those practices are also why search engines like Google will penalize pages for irrelevant metadata. 

Social Engineering

Web 2.0 emerged with the new millennium, giving users a more interactive web experience. With this came the birth and eventual rise of social media platforms. Myspace and LiveJournal were early arrivals, but they would soon be eclipsed by Facebook, which would come to dominate the social media landscape, offering users the ability to create short and long-form content on one platform and connect with other users. 

With the rise of social media came a new focus for advertisers, who became more interested in targeting consumers based on interest and demographics. Where specific websites might contain ads that matched the website's content, social media advertising became broader and varied. A knitting website might only have ads related to crafts. However, your Facebook feed, once advertising entered the picture, would show you all kinds of products and services, with targeting becoming more specific as Facebook collected and shared information. 

The Mobile Era

The next big shift in digital marketing came with the mobile age. While mobile phones had been around since the 1980s, the phone as a personal computing device didn't see mainstream adoption until 2007, with the introduction of the iPhone. As more people began to adopt mobile smartphones, the ways digital marketers reached people changed, as sites and ads needed to change and optimize to new formats. 

The mass adoption of the mobile phone, however, had other effects. As people began to spend more time online, between their computers and phones, and more of their daily lives became entwined with their mobile devices, privacy became a bigger concern. While people had been concerned about information sharing before smartphones took over, as devices began tracking people's movements and app usage, the consumers by and large began to understand just how much information platforms had access to - and so did politicians. 

The AI Era

While we treat AI as something new, it's been with us since the beginning of digital marketing. The early web crawlers that indexed websites and facilitated quick and easy web searches are an early form of AI. While simple compared to the algorithms we use today, they were still created to function with little human interference.

These newer models, however, have decades of building and learning behind them. As our AI models become more sophisticated, we will see them take on larger roles in marketing, data analysis, and perhaps in how websites and media platforms are put together in the future.