Digital Marketing

The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World

The first global communications network the highway of thought

To understand the explosive growth of the internet we need to look back at how early communications technology evolved into the global network of interconnected computers that today we call the internet.

Tom Standage, in his book The Victorian Internet, looks at the wired telegraph and draws some astonishing parallels between the growth of the world’s first electronic communications network and the growth of the modern-day internet.

Early networks

The internet story really starts in 1957, with the USSR’s launch of the sputnik satellite. In 1958, the US Department of Defense set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) – a specialist agency established with a specific remit: making sure the United States stayed ahead of its cold war nemesis in the accelerating technology race.

You’ve got mail

E-mail, which is still often described as the internet’s ‘killer application’, began life in the early 1960s as a facility that allowed users of mainframe computers to send simple text-based messages to another user’s mailbox on the same computer. But it wasn’t until the advent of ARPANET that anyone considered sending electronic mail from one user to another across a network.

From ARPANET to the internet

The term ‘internet’ was first used in 1974 by US computer scientist Vint Cerf (commonly referred to as one of the ‘fathers of the internet, and now a senior executive and internet evangelist with Google). Cerf was working with Robert Khan at DARPA on a way to standardize the way that different host computers communicated across both the growing ARPANET and between the ARPANET and other emerging computer networks. The TCP (Transmission Control Program) network protocol they defined evolved to become the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Program/Internet Protocol) protocol suit that is still used to this day to pass packets of information backwards and forwards across the internet.

Making connections – the birth of the web

It was in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee, a British developer working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, proposed a system of information cross-referencing, access and retrieval across the rapidly growing internet, based on ‘hypertext’ links. The concept of a hypertext information architecture was nothing new, and was already being used in individual programs running on individual computers around the world. The idea of linking documents stored on different computers across the rapidly growing internet, though, was nothing short of revolutionary.

Enough technology… let’s talk about people

If you’re non-technical the world of digital marketing may seem a bit daunting at first. All that technology must be really complicated… right? Not necessarily. One of the key things to remember if you’re new to digital marketing is this: digital marketing isn’t actually about technology at all, it’s all about people. In that sense it’s similar to traditional marketing: it’s about people (marketers) connecting with other people (consumers) to build relationships and ultimately drive sales.

But connecting with people one-on-one can be tedious and time-consuming. It is where automating tools frees up a lot of our time. Such software can help you create customizable lead generation campaigns that can make you money and save you time. These campaigns can be programmed with customized follow-ups that don’t feel like junk. Once the target engages and allows the connection, the marketer should talk to them personally since relationship building is essential to success. You should go ahead and learn about network marketing and gain insights on what to automate and what to customize through person-to-person contact.

A huge and growing market

Although internet companies suffered bruised finances and a tarnished public image in the wake of the dot.com crash, the internet itself never stopped growing, both in terms of the number of websites online, and, crucially from a marketing perspective, the number of people with internet access. In March 2000, when the dot.com bubble burst, there were an estimated 304 million people in the world with internet access.

Last word

We believe a big idea can beat the weight of a media schedule; that ingenuity and creativity are more critical to effectiveness than the size of the campaign budget. Bigger thinking can and does win hearts and minds. Its how in 2012, we won more Effie awards for more clients than any other agency in Australia, including The Grand Effie. A tally we’ve since proudly added further too in 2013.

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