An Incomplete History of the Last Decade of Digital Marketing

If you follow our Facebook page, you may have noticed that early last week, we quietly marked the 10-year anniversary of envisionit media, inc. We’ll be celebrating properly as the year goes on (so be sure to keep up with us here and on Facebook and Twitter for updates). Meanwhile, I thought I’d take a look back at a few notable differences between the digital marketing landscape a decade ago and today.

It wouldn’t be a very quick read if I included every single difference, so these are just my faves. Enjoy the walk down memory lane and provide your own memories in the comments!

OMG, what did we do without Facebook?
That’s right…10 years ago, Facebook didn’t. even. exist. Gasp! Social media was barely even a phrase. Yes, the idea of social media has been alive for some time—think instant messenger and message boards. But the marketing world’s favorite buzzword of the last few years didn’t quite yet have today’s popularity and meaning back in 2002.

And how quickly the space has grown! In 2002, Friendster was introduced. Myspace followed in 2003. Flickr and Digg hit in 2004, and that same year the college scene was introduced to The Facebook. Twitter was born in 2006. StumbleUpon, FourSquare, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest…all these social networks later, and companies now commonly have dedicated social media marketing roles and entire departments.

Phone is ringin’…
I happened to graduate from college in December 2001 (which is why I know to follow up this section’s subtitle with “…oh my god.” Name the reference in the comments if you know it!) and got my first cell phone a few months later in 2002. It was the standard Nokia phone that everyone else had. It made calls, it received calls, that was about it. Some fancy people had PDAs at the time, but it would be a few years before Blackberrys found popularity and exactly 5 years until the first iPhone was introduced. And now? There’s an app for that! And QR codes, geo-fencing, mobile-friendly websites, mobile SEO…and the word on the street for a few years now has been that the future is mobile marketing.

Google was a preschooler
When EIM incorporated in 2002, Google was about 4 years old. Interestingly, for a company so infamous for its beta projects, always pushing change and improvements, their layout has actually stayed fairly similar since early 2002 (although they clearly were still not putting weight on aesthetics, and wouldn’t for about a decade).

Also notable, Google’s paid advertising platform Adwords was a toddler in 2002; the service was introduced in 2000. And not to exclude the little guys: it would be 2 more years before Yahoo tried powering its own search results, which it kept at for 6 years until merging with Bing in 2010. And Bing had just launched in 2009, 7 years after envisionit’s birth!

That’s my quick glimpse at the past. The question now is, what will the digital marketing landscape look like in another 10 years? Can you (forgive me, but it’s just too easy) envisionit?