A Brief History of Advertising! When you think of advertising what are the things that come to your mind? Commercials on Youtube or Television? Affordable SEO services? Pop-ups when you visit a website? You might come across dozens of ads every day across all platforms or hear a jingle on the radio and associate it with a well-known brand. You might come across a logo and immediately know the company that represents it. To be honest, it is almost impossible to avoid it and all these actions are all because of advertising which is here to stay. However, how did it all start? Online Advertising: Online advertising is marketing the business using different platforms, tactics, and strategies to get new customers, deliver brand messages, build brand identity, and bring in website traffic. Remember when surfing the internet meant entering the world of unwelcome ads? The digital advertising industry has involved exponentially since 1994, the year that the first flashing banner and random sidebar ads appeared. The evolution of advertising has experienced some major milestones and has matured a lot since those days, as it’s had to adapt and change to suit new mediums and audiences constantly- and where there’s still room for improvement. Entering the dotcom bust: After 1999, the web started to expand rapidly, the one medium that has had the biggest impact on the history of advertising and advertising personalization is paid search, pay per click, and brand emerging on search engines using affordable SEO services. With search engines steadily gaining popularity, advertisers and brands started emerging online and began creating ads and targeting people using tactics that were more targeted and strategic. With each leap forward, from banner ads to pop-ups occurring to pay-per-click and now SEO and social media, each aspect has brought the field of online advertising closer to absolute industry supremacy. Today, along with search engine searches most people rely on social media from branding to building brand identity. Once you open Instagram you will see ads built that will redirect you to their websites. And when you click away from Facebook, run a simple search using keywords like ‘advertising company’ and ‘SEO services at affordable prices for small businesses’ you will see ads and some of the websites ranking organically because of SEO services. Marketers started to focus on User-generated content: Today’s digital era is all about building trust and relationships. Hence, consumers are more likely to communicate their feelings on social media which can become a great medium to build a community and use highly-targeted content. Education is the first step that helps the custom decide whether the product or service the brand offers is right for them or not. This means it is important to have content that properly educates the visitors to your website. This leads us to another point.
Having content on your website is not enough. Just imagine living in a house without having any signage on it- no name, no location, and nothing else in particular. How can you expect people to drop in? A similar case is with websites, they need to have a brand name, product or services, and related keyword optimization so that they can attract people locally as well as globally. To be visible, it is important to tell the search engine what product or service you are providing. SEO unlike traditional advertising channels, which typically involve reaching out to consumers whether they are interested in the product or not, digital marketing makes it easy for your audience to find you when they want the information. From shopping for shoes to socializing with people to streaming content, advertising is a hub for essentially every single facet of contemporary life. Though it is hard to boil the history of advertising and how digital advertising has evolved into a few words. However, commercials, sponsored content, SEO optimization, product placement, all the aspects of marketing are here to stay.