The Marketing series will finally come to a close with the last article covering Internet Advertising.
The earliest statistic from Internet Advertisements traces back to 1998 at an $800 million dollar investment and has grown 14 times in 7 years at a $12 billion dollar investment by 2005. The rate of growth however has slowed between the next 7 years at a $17 billion dollar investment by 2012 and the significant growth in the 7 years prior was due to the tech boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, the trajectory of marketing is going into a whole new direction where companies like Facebook’s main revenue stream is based on internet advertisements. In the first marketing article, I covered the history that took place between the late 1800s to 1950s where business professionals were first privileged to have the means to develop goods to sell at high demand and low supply but after decades passed the supply continued to grow while demand decreased. These privileged business professionals who took advantage of the production orientation then began to compete against other businesses and develop a sales orientation and then a marketing orientation that I’ve covered throughout the length of this marketing series of articles. But now, business professionals are at an impasse where we must develop the new path for selling and the internet has become the medium in which marketing will ultimately progress once a business professionals adapt. The aforementioned growth in Internet Advertisements investments truly epitomizes this evolution in the marketing orientation.
The benefits to the marketer of investing into internet advertising is the cost effectiveness and interaction. Internet advertising provides low wasted circulation, high CPM rate, and is overall quite inexpensive. As I mentioned in the last article, the main mediums of media for marketing includes print, direct mail, and broadcast media. Direct mail has been the least wasted circulation among the three mediums of media for marketing but internet advertising greatly decreases the amount of wasted circulation that direct mail sustains solely due to internet advertisement’s targeted content. Search engine providers like Google provide far greater targeted advertising than direct mail due to the amount of information the internet can access about the user and the contact between the user and the advertisement is much more proximate. The audience of the internet is much more populated which provides a much higher CPM rate and its vastly more inexpensive because majority of internet advertising is automated via programming. Internet advertising is also very interactive which provides a pull strategy to encourage extensive decision making.
The forms of internet advertising typically includes banner ads, targeted email, and portal arrangements which I’m sure we’re all well aware of at some point. Banner ads are the advertisement banners that populate web pages. These banner ads are typically meant to reach a large audience and provides a high CPC or cost per click. Over the decade however, CPC rates have greatly reduced and software clients such as adblock has greatly diminished the revenue stream banner ads used to provide. Targeted email is similar to the direct mail media for marketing but is far more targeted due to the surplus of information websites can gather about you than traditional snail mail. As a result, targeted email also provides low wasted circulation due to mailing lists; although, the high noise factor is still present due to junk and spam mail. Portal arrangements or search related ads is also considered heavily targeted marketing due to how much search engines learn about users due to our consistent internet searches. Organic links are usually not paid for as they are ranked by the amount of visits to particular websites and the search relevancy but paid advertising links on search engines are paid for. You can notice paid advertising links when you do a search and notice a few links that populate the beginning of the search on a search engine like Google. Google’s paid advertising links are populated by Google’s Adwords internet advertising service. These portal arrangements have a high click through rate but typically a low click cost.
I hope you enjoyed this Marketing series of articles which is finally complete with a total of 18 articles. This was by far my longest series of articles to date and I hope you learned a lot. As I mentioned in the first marketing article, marketing was the hardest course I’ve taken and we covered 3 times as much content as the MBA equivalent; however, I was honored to have taken the course from the professor who started the marketing concentration. As for now, I plan to take a break for a few months before I begin my next business series of articles. Thank you for reading!
