I’ve been in marketing for more than 20 years, but I’ve been online longer. As a kid, I spent 10 hours a day on message boards and online video games as soon as my family got dial-up.
The Internet was basically my life.
Yet when I started my marketing career in 2003, I was working for a traditional agency with clients like Xerox and Aetna, and we were primarily analog. Campaigns were typically direct mail, supported by TV, radio, and telemarketing.
It may sound ridiculous now, but at the time, digital marketing was a thing.
That job gave me a unique perspective on the impact the Internet had on marketing. I saw the industry before the digital transformation, and when I started my own company in 2010, I saw the industry after.
Or more accurately, the aftershocks.
Marketing is still dealing with those aftershocks. When brands numeros de telefono brasil moved online, it upended a complex web of industry norms, and we didn’t have new norms. Instead, we were in chaos—at least for now.
Inside a (mostly) analog agency, circa 2003
I worked in marketing and did direct mail marketing. If you think this isn’t relevant, don’t worry.
s, and they’re still everywhere. From banneevery clickable digital promotion was also direct response marketing.
The difference is that direct mail takes time to grow. Unlike Facebook ads, it can take months or even years to grow.
Direct mail takes time to grow. Unlike Facebook ads, it can take months or even years to grow.
Nonetheless, in my first three months at the agency, I learned basically everything I needed to know about doing direct response. The basic principles about data segmentation, attribution, and calls to action (CTAs) remained the same.
I started seeing opportunities for direct response strategies everywhere—even in blogs.
During my time at the company, I created a football blog. The blog was simple—three roundup posts a day—but it became one of the most popular and commented-on blogs on the internet.
This was thanks to direct response strategies. For example, in each post, I tested different CTAs to entice people to leave a comment and optimized accordingly.
Blogging taught me that direct response strategies were not only for the internet, but would become one of the driving forces behind online consumer behavior.
Many people didn’t realize this yet. It was the early days of the internet, and digital marketing was still in its infancy; optimizing for performance wasn’t common practice yet.
Seven years later, marketing would never be the same again.