Catch me up?
Part 1: From Billboards to Bots: Marketing’s Wild Evolution
Part 2: The Dawn of Computing—the 1950s
Part 3: The 1960’s (and 70’s): Women flex their marketing muscles
The 1980’s were jam packed with marketing advances and excitement.
- Bar code scanners were introduced, and retailers began to collect consumers’ behavioral data on the spot
- Database marketing emerged as the precursor to CRM—and so did relationship marketing
- Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign kicked off
- Spam—ugh—was born
In 1982, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) became the first tech company to run a TV ad. At the time it was a really big deal. Today, nobody even remembers it.In 1984, only two years later, Apple Computer aired its legendary “Sledge Hammer” ad. With its play on George Orwell’s 1984, it’s an important part of our marketing and cultural history and really fun to watch. Legendary marketer Regis McKenna was the
creator of that ad.
Interestingly, guerrilla marketing, which features low-cost, unconventional promotional strategies, was introduced the same year. And by the mid-80’s, desktop publishing appeared, democratizing the media—although, at the time, we didn’t know where that would lead us.
If you don’t remember these events, it’s because you’re part of Gen Y, the 18-30-year-old cohort also known as the Millennials. But you’ll definitely be able to identify with everything from here on.
On August 6, 1991, just 35 years ago, the World Wide Web became publicly available. Its creator, the now internationally known Tim Berners-Lee, posted a short summary of the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup and gave birth to a new form of communication and information sharing that would fundamentally change the world as we knew it.
JUST FOR FUN: The Internet Has a Local Beer Garden Connection
Here’s a fun Silicon Valley history tidbit: Fifteen years before Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web publicly available, an important early Internet experiment took place at a beer garden in Portola Valley, California.
On August 27, 1976, researchers from SRI International set up a computer outside Rossotti’s Alpine Inn (now the Alpine Inn Beer Garden) and transmitted data by radio to SRI in Menlo Park and ultimately to Boston.
So, while the World Wide Web was born in Europe, you could argue that the Internet itself had a pretty good California origin story—with a picnic table, a computer, and beer.
The communications industry now addressed a wider cross-section of professionals in many areas of integrated marketing and kept pace with the excitement and pervasiveness of Silicon Valley innovation.
In 1995, companies began using their websites to mine consumer transactional data. Historical sidelight: Interestingly, as of January 1996, only 100,000 websites existed. That figure represents tremendous growth from the 130 sites in existence in mid-1993.
Even given that relatively paltry number, Google emerged in 1998, providing a way to search what would become a staggeringly large volume of online information. Google, of course, wasn’t the first search engine, but it’s arguably the one we know the best—and the only one whose name became a verb.
PR Goes Digital
The arrival of the Web also began changing the day-to-day work of public relations professionals.
In 1997, the PR and communications industry was undergoing a major shift from physical media directories to digital ones, led by a strategic alliance between Bacon’s Information and MediaMap.
During this period, the landscape was dominated by a few major players who provided PR pros and publicists with digital media contact information, editorial calendars, and tracking capabilities:
- Bacon’s Information (now part of Cision): Historically famous for its massive, print-bound directories, Bacon’s was the powerhouse of media tracking. In 1997, it formed a landmark strategic alliance with MediaMap to merge its extensive databases and software, establishing the foundation for modern electronic PR platforms.
- MediaMap: Widely considered a pioneer in the mid-to-late 1990s for software-driven media databases, MediaMap specialized in providing digital, up-to-date tracking of high-tech journalists and editorial calendars.
- Burrelle’s & Luce: Known primarily for traditional press clipping services, these legacy giants were also shifting their deep media tracking networks online during the late 1990s.
- ResponseSource (UK/Europe): Founded in 1997 as Daryl Willcox Publishing (and later renamed), it launched Europe’s first online media database, paving the way for digital public relations across the Atlantic.
And Then There Were Search Engines
Search engines were also evolving rapidly. In the early days of the Web, companies weren’t just trying to help people find information—they were trying to become the place people went first.
Yahoo, Excite, AltaVista, AOL and MSN began adding content, email, news, channels and other features to keep users on their sites. The lines between search engine, online service and destination website started to blur.
For public relations professionals, however, the bigger change was more fundamental: people could now search for you.
PR had always been about getting an organization, product or person noticed. Now, communications professionals had to start thinking about what happened when someone went looking for them online.
A New Specialty
Search visibility would eventually become part of reputation management, SEO, media relations and content strategy. A press release wasn’t simply something a reporter might receive; a website wasn’t merely an online brochure. Both could become part of the information a customer, journalist or prospect found when they searched.
And the profession was beginning to develop a new specialty around making sure people could actually find that information. Search Engine Watch launched in 1997 with guidance on how search engines worked and how website owners could improve their online visibility.
In other words, PR was beginning to move from “How do we get the story out?” to “What will people find when they go looking for the story?”
That’s a distinction that would become very important in the years ahead.
By the end of the 1990’s, marketers hit pay dirt. Web analysis tools like HitBox hit the scene and we started using cookies to track consumer activity on the web—a precursor to today’s annoying pop-up ads and spyware. Marketers used words like “synergy” to describe more sophisticated cross-promotions.
And from 1995 through 2001, the dot-com bubble temporarily redefined the future of marketing.
Tune in next week for Part 5: 2000–2010 – The Year the DOT-COM Bubble Burst
