A Brief History of Internet Marketing: Part 1

The Internet: New Medium, Budgets, Challenges and Opportunities
(c) 2008, Rob Ainbinder

Abstract
The evolution of the Internet and Internet Marketing in particular has fundamentally changed the way we market, how we market and the allocation of marketing budgets.

The evolution of the Internet and Internet Marketing in particular has fundamentally changed the way we market, how we market and the allocation of marketing budgets. We have transformed from an era of one-to-many mass communication into an era of one-to-one mass communication. At the same time that these new mediums have arrived marketing budgets have had to be adapted to encompass the new mix of opportunities and challenges. A brief discussion of the evolution of these new marketing vehicles and their impact on marketing budgets will be discussed in the pages that follow.

Some of the earliest electronic advertising by today's standards is considered to be spam. A message was posted on Usenet promoting an immigration law firm and so began electronic advertising (Fiest & Everret-Church, 1999). The Usenet is one of the oldest structures pre-dating the Internet. With the Usenet's introduction community organizers quickly discovered the need to make announcements and summarize communication on the Usenet forums. These early “newsletters” were entirely text only messages. The discussion groups we use today, were largely influenced by these early discussion groups.

The introduction of HTML, e-mail protocols and messaging platforms that render this code gave the marketer and the recipient an increasingly more content richer experience with graphics to support branding, product pictures and video to support sales. Even as e-mail was developing their were more developments happening online.

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(c) 2008, Rob Ainbinder

Adwords PPC Optimization Over Kill

I was surfing tonight and encountered an Adwords ad to own a McDonald's franchise. Note: I am not looking in to quick serve opportunities... just curious what the landing page had to say. What I saw was a lot of highly emphasized text... that made no sense.

• The headline for the page "Fast Food Franchises Franchise" didn't make all that much sense. A plural and singular form of the word in the headline doesn't read all that well. Does it?
• The main call to action: "Request More Information from Fast Food Franchises Franchise" repeats the grammatical errors of the headline. But, more than just a grammar error does it instill in the visitor that they are submitting information to a trustworthy source?

The other thing that struck me was this landing page, that the advertiser paid for me to land on, is also advertising other franchise opportunities at the top of the page!