This infographic highlights how Digital Advertising changed in the past 25 years

25 years of digital advertising is an era of different generations if you take a look at it. No matter how good a product or a service is, to attract potential customers advertising plays a vital role. Since the early 1990s, Digital advertising changed the concept of marketing for all sorts of businesses. We all have seen the era of billboards, flyers and various posters used to advertise products but don’t see much of it anymore. Do you ever think about why it changed over the past years? We think one of the major factors that led the advertisements through billboards change to digital advertising is the launch of so many analytical technologies. The innovation of technology over the past years is increasing and very less likely to slow down anytime soon. From banner ads to artificial intelligence, digital advertising has been through an eventful journey to deliver the right content to the right potential customer at the exact time of their needs.

Recently, Adobe did some deep research on all the milestones achieved in digital marketing over the past 25 years and displayed it as a short highlight of the events that took place during that time, and the folks at Grazitti Interactive gave those insights a better visual look in the form of an infographic.

Here’s a trip down memory lane of 25 years of digital marketing:

· 1994- The era of Banner ads

HotWired- part of Wired magazine released banner ads in 1994. The click-through rates of banners ads during this era was 44%.

· 1995- The launch of Yahoo

To track the user behavior on the internet- HTTP cookies were launched and along with that Yahoo was also launched over the internet which became the primary search engine for the web.

· 1996- Flash 1.0

In 1996, Flash 1.0 was introduced to users of the internet which became a robust framework for advertising over the web. Content Marketing was introduced into the society through American Society for Newspaper Editors.

· 1997- Pop-up ads

To grab user attention and to gain the interests of potential customers pop-up ads were discovered during this year.

· 1998- Introduction to Google

One of the game-changer products to this date in the market of the digital advertising industry was the introduction of the Google Search Engine. Advertising networks creating their own way and connecting to various websites through advertising.

· 1999- Paid search

Another concept was introduced in the market of digital advertising known as a paid search for Pay-Per-Click advertising. This concept of Pay-For-Placement searches was introduced by GoTo.com and it changed the concept of digital advertising forever.

· 2000- Google AdWords

In this year Google AdWords was born which helped to sort the advertising of Pay-Per-Clicks. In this same year, Mobile Advertising was also introduced.

· 2001- The Dot Com Bubble bursts

This era faced a major downfall on the internet also known as the dot com bubble bursts which expanded from the mid-1990s to 2000.

· 2002- Adblocker

In this year the first Adblocker was launched as a browser extension

· 2003- LinkedIn

A social networking site specifically designed for professionals was launched in this year.

· 2004- Launch of Facebook

The largest social networking site till now was launched in this era with its first advertisement known as Facebook Flyers.

· 2005- Launch of YouTube

This year along with YouTube came the launch of broadband connections providing fast performance and connectivity.

· 2006- Digital Ads

Hyper-targeted digital ads were launched in this year.

· 2007- Launch of iPhone

A major hype in the mobile industry.

· 2008- Launch of term Digital agency

The term named digital agency was launched in this year along with the App Store for iPhone users.

· 2009- Instant

To support real-time search engine Instant was released by Google.

· 2010- Launch of iPad

Apple launches its very own iPad in this year.

· 2011- Snapchat

Social network with the use of videos with augmented reality features.

Also read: Content Marketing Lifecycle: 7 Stages of Content That Marketers Should Know About

· 2013- Real-time marketing

This year, Instagram launched a new feature of promoted posts that can enable users to run ads while promoting previous posts on Instagram.

· 2014- In-app advertising

Due to the increase in smartphones, the focus of advertising changed from mobile advertising to in-app advertising and in this same year, Amazon launched first speech recognition technology.

· 2015- More mobile traffic than web traffic

For the first time ever, the usage of video content also raised.

· 2016- Pokemon Go

This new app with more than 45 million users from all over the world changed the concept of augmented reality forever.

· 2017- Ads.txt

In this year IAB introduced Ads.txt and the revenue generated by digital agencies almost doubled since 2009.

· 2018- Release of voice technology

Digital assistants like Alexa, Google, Siri, and Cortana were released in this year.

· 2019- Personalized advertising

Due to the use of IoT and AI companies could deliver more relevant content and personalized advertising.