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The History of Marketing in the US, part 2 · The Last Analog Marketers

• speaker-0: And now you're listening to Analog Marketers Podcast. For marketers who through speaker-1: The last analyst lived the transition to digital and the newcom inherited the results. to understand with intention. With your hosts, Aaron Peterson and speaker-0: Jamie Jones. You're listening to The Last Analog Marketers, and I'm Aaron Peterson. speaker-1: And I'm Jamie Jones. This is part two of our deep dive series. Aaron kicked off part one with the origins of marketing up through the dawn of digital. Today I'm going to lead you through the rest, marketing's transformation from the 1990s through the early 2020s. I'll walk you through the big turning points and the tech that created or accelerated them. speaker-0: Yeah, thanks for that setup, Jamie. ⁓ like you said, let's just dive right in. We'll start with the nineties, truly some of the best years for culture, for creativity and more. Our formidable years for sure. ⁓ why don't you start out by telling us a little bit about ⁓ how the early web changed marketing when it came in? speaker-1: Absolutely. So the 90s are the moment that marketing stopped being about mass broadcast and started flirting with interactivity. A few quick things to sort of set us up. The web made content discoverable 24 7. Shocking, we all know that today, but at the time, super different, not something people were used to. Banner ads started to introduce the idea of paying for eyeballs online, and email opened a direct one to one channel. None of it was pretty at first. Anyone online during AOL CD phase ⁓ can remember and dial up internet. It was not very pretty. But structurally, it really mattered for what was to come. This is why the new age of marketing really took off. You and I were still coming of age and getting our start, but the seasoned marketers and professionals that I've talked to t told stories about suddenly having a new channel at their disposal and it was measurable in a way that TV just wasn't. The clicks were crude, but they were data. And this was new access to data set expectations. Campaigns could be tracked, iterated, and optimized in real time. I mean, real time is to come, but we thought it was real time. Now, mind you, it's 1990s and not 2020s, but it was a huge improvement on what they had been previously working with. Maybe most importantly, digital leveled the playing field. For the first time, small players could reach audiences without huge media buys. The low barrier to entry started shifting power away from purely big budget brands. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean it was definitely disruptive at b as a format, n both because of the way that it changed the way that we reached audiences, but I mean, who can forget those early banrads, right? They were basically digital billboards that screamed for attention, you know, literally flashing on your screen on the sides and tops of, you know, web pages. speaker-1: ⁓ my gosh. Ugly, loud, but truly revolutionary. And and the underlying lesson was there. Measurable interaction beats assumption. And assumption is a lot of what we talked about in part one. They didn't always know whether it was making a difference. Now we start to know. speaker-0: Yeah, that makes sense. And so then as the nineties starts to come to an end and we start to focus on the excitement or impending doom, depending on how you look at it, of the new millennium, what's sort of the next big shift that we see? speaker-1: I think it's all one word, search. Starting in the late 90s and the early 2000s, the rise of search is the second turning point. Google changed intent-based marketing. Before search, ads pushed messages outward and hoped for recall. With search, it was different and better. Marketers could now meet people in their moment of need. SEO and Paid Search created a whole new discipline, optimizing for queries, buying keywords, and thinking in user intent. And basically everything took off pretty quickly from there. With each passing year in the early 2000s, technological improvements brought more change. First sophisticated indexing and ranking algorithms, then improved platforms with auction-based pricing and quality scores. Suddenly anyone could buy intent at scale and measure conversion behavior end to end. And I really saw this when I worked at 24/7 Media, which was a part of what is now Zaxxis, which became ZPP Media. Where we were selling a lot of long tail, right? And the entire proposal that we were selling to these brands was, Hey, you're gonna reach the same audience, but you're not gonna pay that CNN dot com pricing. So ⁓ from there, growth and improvements in technology basically rewired the budget. Brands move more spend to performance-driven channels because the performance was accountable. Maybe most important of all, search birthed the idea of lifetime value optimization. If you can see acquisition costs and the downstream revenue, then you can plan long-term customer economics. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean maybe it's because of the age that we were at the time, but I feel like thinking on it now, we welcomed search with open arms and but now maybe AI with a little bit of trepidation. ⁓ even though, like I say, in retrospect, it sort of feels like they were equally these tsunami like waves in our industry and in our society. And so maybe we need to think about that as we are thinking about AI and how we move forward. But looking past searches rise, where or when was it that marketers first started really obsessing over attribution? speaker-1: Pretty soon after that, search creates massive opportunities and also a ton of new headaches. ⁓ the search exposed attribution challenges. Are we talking about last click? Are we talking about ⁓ multi-touch attribution? You know, the debates started then and honestly, they haven't stopped. I know that that's a conversation I was still having in 2026. So I think it forced teams to ask smarter questions about how channels work together. And I still think that. The mixed media model is a challenge and I don't think we ever have quite a hundred percent figured it out. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean I feel like those years between the mid nineties to the mid two thousands felt pretty revolutionary. And then we've got the rise of social media, right? So walk us through that rise and the domination of the social platforms that we've now loved and or hated, ⁓ and of course the ones that we've lost along the way. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. I think in the modern history of marketing, socials rise is kind of the third turning point and probably the stickiest. Early platforms like Myspace and Friendster evolved into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. But during that time, two things flipped distribution control and trust dynamics. Brands could now build build a following, but the customers became the publishers too. We had user reviews, social posts, influencer content. Authentic peer voices started to outrank polished brand messaging. So with social, we saw an entirely new facet of technological change to deal with as a marketing team. From social graph algorithms to user profiling and later advanced ad targeting using behavioral signals, the platforms introduced organic attention alongside sophisticated ad products. It was a lot to deal with at the time. speaker-0: It really was. speaker-1: And so I think in this most recent phase ⁓ is where if you worked for a B2B company or you worked for a B2C or a D2C, the brands really start to bifurcate, right? As the need for marketing shifts from one-way broadcasting to a community and relationship building, authenticity and access really become king. However, some of these big brands, some of these B2B brands, they really struggle with that. And not all brands have done it well. So social media creates a new paradox around really bringing your authentic brand ⁓ forward. It also creates this new thing that everyone's talking about, which is privacy. As powerful as search was, and then online targeting and retargeting. We all remember the cookie debate. Really, social media is where privacy really starts to come to the forefront, and ethical and regulatory questions ⁓ continue to grow and arise with. way social starts to come onto the scene. At the intersection of attention and authenticity, social gave brands a voice to be both public and fragile, but did they do it well? That's the question. speaker-0: Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned cookies because I couldn't help but think that Google saying that they're going to retire cookies kinda s feels a little bit like ⁓ Lucy and Charlie in the football, right? They keep saying they're going to do it and everybody's like kind of scrambles and prepares for the moment and then they're like, ⁓ actually we're gonna hold off on that. But anyway, so in in that scenario though, so brands lost a little bit of the control, but on the other side of it, they got like unlimited content, right? speaker-1: Sometimes they lost a lot of control. I mean, viral moments work and they're glorious, but we've seen a lot of catastrophic failures along the way too. speaker-0: True, absolutely true. Now parallel to the rise of the different marketing technologies and platforms, we also start to see sort of the different advertising mechanisms pop up. Explain to us a bit about how programmatic and Martech became such a big part of the marketing team's focus and budget as we grew forward past that social move movement. speaker-1: I mean, do up my personal story of Martech, because it feels like in the beginning there was no tech and then now it's all tech all the time. But no, from the late 2000s into the 2010s, we see this massive industrialization of ad buying and marketing operations. ⁓ pragmatic advertising, automated media buying, and real-time bidding, like are just words we're using all the time. And at the same time, the Martech just explodes, right? Everyone has a CRM, everyone has a marketing automation system, everyone has an analytics platform, and everyone has tag managers. That's literally all I talked about for the last five years, it feels like. So teams went from these siloed campaigns that felt good, and maybe we had a little bit of tracking to data, data, data all the time. And I think we somewhere along the way lost a little bit of the focused on good creative. And really started focusing so much of our attention onto attribution and data. ⁓ I think this is also a period where we see streaming enter as another medium. And so with that, there's just another opportunity for advertisers to reach audiences in a new and different way. Sort of the building of the TV and then the paid-for-tv HBO that you sort of covered in ⁓ episode one. I think streaming becomes like the third. part of that. I'm not gonna get super deep into it, but I think we should dive into it into another episode because there's just so much to talk about in the streaming days. ⁓ but I did cover, I think on the last on the last episode about my one last thing about how sometimes those streaming platforms don't have very good ads and you see the same ad over and over again. So I feel like there's a lot to talk about there. But anyway Back to Martech and and data and program programmatic. So basically we're at a time where everything's at speed and scale. Programmatic makes audience based buying efficient. Martech makes it possible to coordinate campaigns across channels and measure everything. So it should have been perfect, right? It should have been eaten. speaker-0: Wonderful. Sounds great. speaker-1: But it wasn't. I was there. Unfortunately, there are serious unintended consequences, extreme complexity. Teams had to manage dozens of tools, reconcile data, and solve integration nightmares. This was the era when marketing becomes really technical. You now need op skills, data engineers, and a strong governance structure to win. What marketers gained in their ability to personalize at scale, they lost in their dependency on the data pipeline. speaker-0: Yeah, there's just so much in this time period that moves fast with lots of juicy twists and turns. And that's why I'm really excited as we go forward with the podcast, as we'll get to talk about a lot of these topics in a lot more detail than just the surface level mentions that we're talking about right now, just as we sort of set the f the the groundwork. So let's wrap up the history lesson here by chatting a little bit about the changing reliance on mobile and video. speaker-1: Yeah, I think you touched perfectly upon it. We've gone really wide in both of these episodes, and we're gonna have a lot of opportunities to go deep into these topics. But absolutely mobile is the defining distribution layer of the 2010s. I still remember working at an education software technology company and someone walked in with the first iPhone. And I was like, huh? What? I don't even know what that is. But these were techie people and they were thrilled about this new technology. And Lo and behold, it took over everything. But smartphones turned every interaction into potential marketing touch point. We have location signals, push notifications, micro apps. Video really matures during this time. We get short form video, which really hadn't existed before. We have YouTube and then TikTok. ⁓ and it completely changes the way creative is thought about and really a focus on delight and immediacy. Again, we're gonna touch upon privacy taking a really serious toll here as well. I lived through the days of GDPR and GDPR was gonna take over everything and then no one cared about GDPR. Obviously, we're coming to this podcast from the US, so I think our European colleagues had it a little bit different. But you know, GDPR plus some of the platform moves, the cookie depreciation, apples, ATT, like force marketers to rethink about targeting and measurement. Even if we eventually got to go back to what we were originally doing, we went through all these different iterations of having to think about how we were targeting and how it may impact privacy. Basically, the tech change here is twofold. We have richer first-party data and more sophisticated privacy preserving measurement. ⁓ and that's an aggregated modeling and attribution. So I guess it felt like a time of losing and gaining all at the same time. Just when something works. It had to be re-evaluated. Marketers lost some targeting conveniences and had to invest in consent-first data strategies, brand-led performance, and alternative measurement frameworks. But it didn't stop them. The ads kept coming. And maybe most exciting at this point, we start to see the re-emergence of creative and content leading the charge. Because you can't just rely on hyper-targeting. You really need to earn the attention more broadly. speaker-0: Yeah. I mean that that this time period has been so much more focused on understanding all of the data, which like you said, you know, as we came into the beginning of this period, one of the beautiful things or wonderful things about this period was the fact that data was now available that we didn't have previously. And but the problem b the problem became too much data and what to actually do with the data and which data is actually useful, which obviously we can talk to more. But So, you know, with all of that said, where does that leave us now? You know, are we are we back to are we back to balance? Do we need more creativity and brand, but still some performance accountability? How do we figure that out? speaker-1: having a conversation just the other day where I said, I think the best marketers these days are allowed to fail fast. Not just be told they can fail fast, but actually being allowed to fail fast. And I think answering your question is we're still kind of figuring it out. You know, it depends on the day. I do think the pendulum is swinging back towards integrating brand and performance rather than just assuming performance channels will always deliver. Again, I've lived performance marketing and I've also lived brand marketing and product marketing and event marketing and kind of all these different facets of bringing an experience to a customer in a lot of different ways. And I can't say that any of them are like the silver bullet. I really do think you have to find the right mix and have the right internal policies and people who are excited about leaning in at times to one thing and then leaning out and leaning again. Like I just don't think you ever set it and forget it with marketing. I think you have successes and then those same successes could be failures the next year. speaker-0: I think it's a evolving thing. And to your point, the best strategy is to just be engaged and be willing to roll your sleeves up and take on the challenge of whatever next project comes in front of you. Because even if it looks like it might be the same as last year, if you approach it the same way, it's not necessarily going to give you the same results because there's so many other factors that are impacting how you know how things end up. ⁓ so thinking about the nineties through today, sort of what are the takeaways that you have then across these these last couple of decades? speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, I totally recognize that we covered what happened during that time really fast. I think part one, we went really deep and it was so interesting to me because I feel like we didn't live that time. And I needed to remember and hear about some of these like side of the building billboards and what was happening. But you and I and most of the people listening to this podcast like listen lived through the nineties through today. And so We're kind of touching upon the things that I think everyone remembered happening, but sort of maybe don't think about the post, the timeline post of the different things that sort of changed it. But I s I think looking back, there's kind of three themes that I see as being the real change makers of this time period. First, we have measurement at the heart of every marketing decision. The era only added more measurability and expectations. I mean, I literally started my marketing career. with no data. Just like, ⁓ we thought that was good. And if you had fun or if it looked pretty, you should be happy all the way to like, I need to know exactly how much revenue was generated from this very small thing that you did for whatever on and then rinse and repeat. I mean, the change is so dramatic. ⁓ and so I do think measurement really becomes this Theme that grows from nothing to everything in marketing during this time period. ⁓ next, ⁓ I think fragmented distribution is just super obvious, right? There's more channels, more context, more chances to succeed and more chances to fail. And I remember chasing after every new thing, like that was gonna be what made it work, right? ⁓ we're just not on this platform or we're not doing this campaign over here. We haven't optimized for this size or for video or There was a point where it was like, Well, if we just do more if we just do more ⁓ webcasts, webinars. We used to call it webinars crack. Everyone wants a webinar, webinars crack. And like it became short form video. If we just get more short form video, we're gonna solve it. And so speaker-0: I feel like the same thing also happened with, you know, Twitter where it was like, you know, it makes sense to be on, you know, then it made sense to be on Twitter if you were the type of company or brand that wanted to be on there doing short form messaging all the time. But I remember being at points where people were saying to us, you know, we should be have a Twitter account and I thought, Well, who's going to put content on that regularly? You've got it like you've got to be engaged with the me the platform that you're on with the type of content and the type of engagement. And I felt actually a sense of relief in one of my most recent roles when I was given the authority to say, okay, only focus on the social platforms that actually make sense for us and our brand and our audience. And like we don't need to pay attention to any of the other ones, which was again a total turnaround from where we used to be. speaker-1: And we're just showing our age by calling it Twitter and not X, but it will always be Twitter in my book, and there will always be a blue bird. So it just is. ⁓ but yes, absolutely. We both experienced just chasing the new hot thing. And I think because B2B is so different than B2C or D2C, and I think too often B2B saw the sexiness of what B2C and D2C were doing and thought, ⁓ we'll just translate it, right? We'll just be on that platform too. I mean, truthfully, thinking about some of the corporate brands I work for being on TikTok is like a horrifying thought to me. So let's just leave that there. But yes, lots of channels, fragmented distribution doesn't necessarily mean we're getting it all right. And I think it leads into the third point, which maybe is kind of overlap, which is just extreme complexity. A big idea, a great marketing campaign, or a thought, it only takes you so far because we have technology and we have tools. That require execution, skills, and governance. Privacy comes in as well, and consumer control forces marketing to be permission-based and creative first. So we get a lot, but we kind of lose a lot too. And it goes back to that conversation we had in part one about the madmen days. Like I watched those episodes and just long for a time when being a marketer seemed that simple because we've lived in a very complex world of marketing for better or for worse. But I do think. What I feel, and and I think you and I both have seen this in our own careers, is that, you know, marketing becomes this hybrid discipline. We're creative story, storytelling executed with analytic precision and operational discipline. And we don't get that credit, right? I think everybody thinks we're only the former, but the latter is really where like we really make our way within the company if we're able to do those things. So the we wear a lot of hats. If you haven't noticed in marketing. speaker-0: And luckily we look great in them as well. speaker-1: I wore my headphones today, but I guess I should have worn a hat today. speaker-0: Any final thoughts before we wrap up? speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, I as I said earlier, we could dive into a lot of these pieces, these fence post pieces along the way and go a lot deeper. I definitely want to talk more about streaming. I think mobile is a huge piece of it as well. But you know, we definitely understand that technology was such a big part of what happened during this time. If you used it appropriately, anything was at your disposal and everything could be the world was your oyster. ⁓ but it was finding a balance. Of investing in data hygiene and simple internal governments that actually became more important than just like having the budget for the tool. And I saw firsthand ⁓ how much misalignment internally actually didn't allow for success, even when the budget was there to buy the tools that were, you know, gonna solve the problem. speaker-0: Yeah, it's crazy how that works out. Yeah. Thanks, ⁓ Jamie, for the rapid fire history lesson on the tech driven t transformation of marketing from the nineties through the early twenty twenties. Those of you listening, did we miss anything? You know, let us know in the comments. ⁓ we'd love to hear more ⁓ from you and to hear what major milestones or or activities that happened throughout these time periods you think were really influential or just had a really big impact on you and your career. Next episode we're gonna flip the lens and look at where we go from here, so where we think we're heading. So yeah, Jamie, thanks again for schooling us. Thanks. speaker-1: Thanks, Aaron. You were you were the real educator last time, but I appreciate that. If you're our listeners and you enjoyed this, please subscribe, drop a review, send us one ad that you remember from the nineties because I love to do a look at those old ads. They make me feel so happy. Aaron, as we always do, do you want to lead us out with the one last thing? speaker-0: Yeah, sure. So one last thing that I was reading about this week that I thought was really kind of interesting was AdAge put out a first ever confidence index. Okay. And this was a study of marketers to gauge their confidence in the marketing industry. It's the first time they've ever done a study like this, and they just released this in July of ⁓ twenty sixth. So it just came out like a week or so ago. Interesting, just a couple of little findings from it I thought I'd share. One. Overall, ⁓ only about sixty-four percent ⁓ of people who responded to it felt that they were confident in the future of marketing, the where it's heading. And that was like a any bit of somewhat confidence, not like excited confidence. In fact, only fourteen percent said that they felt like Our industry was in a good or excellent place. So everybody else was kind of in that more middle phase of like it's okay, I guess, which I think is an interesting thing to see. And then this isn't exactly the brightest note on here, but nearly six in ten, so not quite sixty percent, expect conditions to worsen over the next six months. But I think what that's probably coming from is the fact that we're still i having a lot of societal environmental factors that are impacting the industry. ⁓ you know, there are things that are impacting the way that money is being spended. I think there's also a lot of uncertainty certainty be just because there's a lot of potential change that could happen, right? Like there's the big talk about whether or not there's going to be like the Paramount Warner Brothers merger and things like that that could potentially have some major impacts on the industry. And that could be some of the things that are making people feel this way. speaker-1: That's super interesting. I hadn't read that, but based on the conversations that we've had offline, it pretty much mirrors ⁓ how we feel about the industry these days as well. I think it's also a perfect ⁓ interlude into our next conversation about where do we go from here, right? I think we probably should cover a little bit about how do we get that confidence back, that swagger. I know in one of the earlier episodes I talked about marketing being like, the department I thought to be in, right? Like why would I wanna be in sales? I want to be in marketing. So like let's get our swagger back. I want to talk about that on the next episode. speaker-0: Yeah, I'm all I'm all for that and let's ⁓ let's start the movement. So let' we'll we'll start having the conversation and then we'll bring more people on board and eventually you know it'll just spread from there. All right, thanks everyone for joining us and ⁓ hope to see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to the share and show your support. speaker-1: Love it. Sounds good. Bye everyone, thank you. The last analogue marketers podcast. Subscribe to keep in tune.