Announcer (00:02)
And now, you’re listening to The Last Analog Marketers podcast. For marketers who lived through the transition to digital and the newcomers who inherited the results. Using the past as a lens to understand the present and navigate the future with intention. With your hosts, Aaron Peterson and Jamie Jones.
Aaron Peterson (00:30)
You’re listening to The Last Analog Marketers, and I’m Aaron Peterson.
Jamie Jones (00:35)
And I’m Jamie Jones. This is part two of our deep-dive series. Aaron kicked off part one with the origins of marketing up through the dawn of digital. Today I’m gonna lead you through the rest: marketing’s transformation from the 1990s through the early 2020s. I’ll walk you through the big turning points and the tech that created or accelerated.
Aaron Peterson (00:57)
Yeah, thanks for that setup, Jamie. Like you said, let’s just dive right in. We’ll start with the 90s, truly some of the best years for culture, for creativity and more. Our formidable years for sure. Why don’t you start out by telling us a little bit about how the early web changed marketing when it came in?
Jamie Jones (01:17)
Absolutely. So the 90s are the moment that marketing stopped being about mass broadcast and started flirting with interactivity. A few quick things to sort of set us up. The web made content discoverable 24-7. Shocking, we all know that today, but at the time, super different, not something people were used to. Banner ads started to introduce the idea of paying for eyeballs online, and email opened a direct one-to-one channel.
None of it was pretty at first. Anyone online during AOL CD phase can remember dial-up internet. It was not very pretty. But structurally, it really mattered for what was to come. This is why the new age of marketing really took off. You and I were still coming of age and getting our start, but the seasoned marketers and professionals that I’ve talked to told stories about suddenly having a new channel at their disposal and it was measurable in a way that TV just wasn’t.
The clicks were crude, but they were data. And this was new access to data set expectations. Campaigns could be tracked, iterated, and optimized in real time. I mean, real time is to come, but we thought it was real time. Now, mind you, it’s 1990s and not 2020s, but it was a huge improvement on what they had been previously working with.
Maybe most importantly, digital leveled the playing field. For the first time, small players could reach audiences without huge media buys. The low barrier to entry started shifting power away from purely big budget brands.
Aaron Peterson (02:51)
Yeah, I mean it was definitely disruptive at b as a format, both because of the way that it changed the way that we reached audiences…but I mean, who can forget those early banner ads, right? They were basically digital billboards that screamed for attention, literally flashing on your screen on the sides and tops of web pages.
Jamie Jones (03:10)
My gosh – ugly, loud, but truly revolutionary. And the underlying lesson was there. Measurable interaction beats assumption. And the assumption is a lot of what we talked about in part one. They didn’t always know whether it was making a difference. Now we start to know.
Aaron Peterson (03:27)
Yeah, that makes sense. And so then as the 90s starts to come to an end and we start to focus on the excitement or impending doom, depending on how you look at it, of the new millennium, what’s sort of the next big shift that we see?
Jamie Jones (03:42)
I think it’s all one word, search. Starting in the late 90s and the early 2000s, the rise of search is the second turning point. Google changed intent-based marketing. Before search ads pushed messages outward and hoped for recall, with search, it was different and better. Marketers could now meet people in their moment of need. SEO and Paid Search created a whole new discipline, optimizing for queries, buying keywords, and thinking in user intent.
And basically everything took off pretty quickly from there. With each passing year in the early 2000s, technological improvements brought more change. First, sophisticated indexing and ranking algorithms, then improved platforms with auction-based pricing and quality scores. Suddenly anyone could buy intent at scale and measure conversion behavior end to end. And I really saw this when I worked at 24/7 Media, which was a part of what is now Zaxxis, which became WPP Media.
Where we were selling a lot of long-tail, right? And the entire proposal that we were selling to these brands was, “Hey, you’re gonna reach the same audience, but you’re not gonna pay that CNN.com pricing.” So from there, growth and improvements in technology basically rewired the budget. Brands moved more spend to performance-driven channels because the performance was accountable. Maybe most important of all, search birthed the idea of lifetime value optimization. If you can see acquisition costs and the downstream revenue, then you can plan long term customer economics.
Aaron Peterson (05:15)
Yeah, maybe it’s because of the age that we were at the time, but I feel like thinking on it now, we welcomed search with open arms, but now, maybe AI with a little bit of trepidation. Even though, like I say, in retrospect, it sort of feels like they were equally these tsunami like waves in our industry and in our society.
And so maybe we need to think about that as we are thinking about AI and how we move forward. But looking past searches rise, where or when was it that marketers first started really obsessing over attribution?
Jamie Jones (05:50)
Pretty soon after that, search creates massive opportunities and also a ton of new headaches. The search exposed attribution challenges. Are we talking about last click? Are we talking about multi-touch attribution? You know, the debates started then and honestly, they haven’t stopped. I know that that’s a conversation I was still having in 2026. So I think it forced teams to ask smarter questions about how channels work together. And I still think that. The mixed media model is a challenge and I don’t think we ever have quite a hundred percent figured it out.
Aaron Peterson (06:25)
Yeah, I feel like those years between the mid-90s to the mid-2000s felt pretty revolutionary. And then we’ve got the rise of social media, right? So walk us through that rise and the domination of the social platforms that we’ve now loved and or hated, and of course the ones that we’ve lost along the way.
Jamie Jones (06:46)
Yeah, absolutely. I think in the modern history of marketing, social’s rise is kind of the third turning point and probably the stickiest. Early platforms like Myspace and Friendster evolved into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. But during that time, two things flipped distribution control and trust dynamics. Brands could now build a following, but the customers became the publishers too. We had user reviews, social posts, influencer content.
Authentic peer voices started to outrank polished brand messaging. So with social, we saw an entirely new facet of technological change to deal with as a marketing team. From social graph algorithms to user profiling and later advanced ad targeting using behavioral signals, the platforms introduced organic attention alongside sophisticated ad products. It was a lot to deal with at the time.
Aaron Peterson (07:41)
It really was.
Jamie Jones (07:43)
And so I think in this most recent phase is where if you worked for a B2B company or you worked for a B2C or a D2C, the brands really start to bifurcate, right? As the need for marketing shifts from one-way broadcasting to a community and relationship building, authenticity and access really become king. However, some of these big brands, some of these B2B brands, they really struggle with that. And not all brands have done it well.
So social media creates a new paradox around really bringing your authentic brand forward. It also creates this new thing that everyone’s talking about, which is privacy. As powerful as search was, and then online targeting and retargeting. We all remember the cookie debate. Really, social media is where privacy really starts to come to the forefront, and ethical and regulatory questions continue to grow and arise with the way social starts to come onto the scene. At the intersection of attention and authenticity, social gave brands a voice to be both public and fragile, but did they do it well? That’s the question.
Aaron Peterson (08:51)
Yeah, it’s funny that you mentioned cookies because I couldn’t help but think that Google saying that they’re going to retire cookies kind of feels a little bit like Lucy and Charlie and the football, right? They keep saying they’re going to do it and everybody’s kind of scrambles and prepares for the moment and then they’re like, “Actually we’re gonna hold off on that.” But anyway, so in that scenario though, so brands lost a little bit of the control, but on the other side of it, they got like unlimited content, right?
Jamie Jones (09:19)
Sometimes they lost a lot of control. I mean, viral moments work and they’re glorious, but we’ve seen a lot of catastrophic failures along the way too.
Aaron Peterson (09:29)
True, absolutely true. Now parallel to the rise of the different marketing technologies and platforms, we also start to see sort of the different advertising mechanisms pop up. Explain to us a bit about how programmatic and Martech became such a big part of the marketing team’s focus and budget as we grew forward past that social movement.
Jamie Jones (09:51)
I mean, do you want my personal story of Martech, because it feels like in the beginning there was no tech and then now it’s all tech all the time. But no, from the late 2000s into the 2010s, we see this massive industrialization of ad buying and marketing operations. Programmatic advertising, automated media buying, and real-time bidding are just words we’re using all the time. And at the same time, the Martech just explodes, right? Everyone has a CRM, everyone has a marketing automation system, everyone has an analytics platform, and everyone has tag managers. That’s literally all I talked about for the last five years, it feels like. So teams went from these siloed campaigns that felt good, and maybe we had a little bit of tracking to data, data, data all the time. And I think we somewhere along the way lost a little bit of the focus on good creative and really started focusing so much of our attention onto attribution and data. I think this is also a period where we see streaming enter as another medium. And so with that, there’s just another opportunity for advertisers to reach audiences in a new and different way, sort of the building of the TV and then the paid for TV HBO that you sort of covered in episode one.
I think streaming becomes like the third part of that. I’m not gonna get super deep into it, but I think we should dive into it into another episode because there’s just so much to talk about in the streaming days. but I did cover, I think, on the last episode about my One Last Thing about how sometimes those streaming platforms don’t have very good ads and you see the same ad over and over again. So I feel like there’s a lot to talk about there. But anyway.
Back to Martech and data and program programmatic. So basically we’re at a time where everything’s at speed and scale. Programmatic makes audience-based buying efficient. Martech makes it possible to coordinate campaigns across channels and measure everything. So it should have been perfect, right? It should have been eaten.
Aaron Peterson (11:53)
Wonderful. Sounds great.
Jamie Jones (11:55)
But it wasn’t. I was there. Unfortunately, there are serious unintended consequences, extreme complexity. Teams had to manage dozens of tools, reconcile data, and solve integration nightmares. This was the era when marketing becomes really technical. You now need op skills, data engineers, and a strong governance structure to win. What marketers gained in their ability to personalize at scale, they lost in their dependency on the data pipeline.
Aaron Peterson (12:24)
Yeah, there’s just so much in this time period that moves fast with lots of juicy twists and turns. And that’s why I’m really excited as we go forward with the podcast as we’ll get to talk about a lot of these topics in a lot more detail than just these surface level mentions that we’re talking about right now, just as we sort of set the groundwork. So let’s wrap up the history lesson here by chatting a little bit about the changing reliance on mobile and video.
Jamie Jones (12:49)
Yeah, I think you touched perfectly upon it. We’ve gone really wide in both of these episodes, and we’re gonna have a lot of opportunities to go deep into these topics. But absolutely, mobile is the defining distribution layer of the 2010s. I still remember working at an education software technology company, and someone walked in with the first iPhone. And I was like, huh? What? I don’t even know what that is. But these were techie people and they were thrilled about this new technology. And
Lo and behold, it took over everything. But smartphones turned every interaction into potential marketing touch point. We have location signals, push notifications, micro apps. Video really matures during this time. We get short form video, which really hadn’t existed before. We have YouTube and then TikTok. And it completely changes the way creative is thought about and really a focus on delight and immediacy.
Again, we’re gonna touch upon privacy taking a really serious toll here as well. I lived through the days of GDPR and GDPR was gonna take over everything, and then no one cared about GDPR. Obviously, we’re coming to this podcast from the US, so I think our European colleagues had it a little bit different. But you know, GDPR plus some of the platform moves, the cookie depreciation, Apple, AT&T, force marketers to rethink about targeting and measurement. Even if we eventually got to go back to what we were originally doing, we went through all these different iterations of having to think about how we were targeting and how it may impact privacy. Basically the tech change here is twofold. We have richer first party data and more sophisticated privacy preserving measurement. And that’s an aggregated modeling and attribution.
So I guess it felt like a time of losing and gaining all at the same time. Just when something worked, it had to be re-evaluated. Marketers lost some targeting conveniences and had to invest in consent-first data strategies, brand-led performance, and alternative measurement frameworks. But it didn’t stop them. The ads kept coming. And maybe most exciting at this point, we start to see the re-emergence of creative and content leading the charge. ‘Cause you can’t just rely on hyper targeting, you really need to earn the attention more broadly.
Aaron Peterson (15:17)
Yeah. That this time period has been so much more focused on understanding all of the data, which like you said, as we came into the beginning of this period, one of the beautiful things or wonderful things about this period was the fact that data was now available that we didn’t have previously. But the problem became too much data and what to actually do with the data and which data is actually useful. Which obviously we can talk to more. But, so, with all of that said, where does that leave us now? Are we back to balance? Do we need more creativity and brand, but still some performance accountability? How do we figure that out?
Jamie Jones (15:57)
I was having a conversation just the other day where I said, I think the best marketers these days are allowed to fail fast. Not just be told they can fail fast, but actually being allowed to fail fast. And I think answering your question is we’re still kind of figuring it out. It depends on the day. I do think the pendulum is swinging back towards integrating brand and performance rather than just assuming performance channels will always deliver. Again, I’ve lived performance marketing and I’ve also lived brand marketing and product marketing and event marketing and kind of all these different facets of bringing an experience to a customer in a lot of different ways. And I can’t say that any of them are like the silver bullet. I really do think you have to find the right mix and have the right internal policies and people who are excited about leaning in at times to one thing and then leaning out and leaning again. Like I just don’t think you ever ‘set it and forget it’ with marketing. I think you have successes and then those same successes could be failures the next year.
Aaron Peterson (17:02)
A hundred percent. I think it’s an evolving thing. And to your point, the best strategy is to just be engaged and be willing to roll your sleeves up and take on the challenge of whatever next project comes in front of you. Because even if it looks like it might be the same as last year, if you approach it the same way, it’s not necessarily going to give you the same results because there’s so many other factors that are impacting how you know how things end up.
So, thinking about the 90s through today, what are the takeaways that you have then across these last couple of decades?
Jamie Jones (17:37)
Yeah, I totally recognize that we covered what happened during that time really fast. I think part one, we went really deep and it was so interesting to me because I feel like we didn’t live that time. And I needed to remember and hear about some of these side-of-the-building billboards and what was happening. But you and I and most of the people listening to this podcast lived through the 90s through today. And so we’re kind of touching upon the things that I think everyone remembered happening, but sort of maybe don’t think about the post, the timeline post of the different things that sort of changed it. But I think looking back, there’s kind of three themes that I see as being the real change makers of this time period. First, we have measurement at the heart of every marketing decision. The era only added more measurability and expectations. I mean, I literally started my marketing career with no data. Just, we thought that was good. And if you had fun or if it looked pretty, you should be happy all the way to, I need to know exactly how much revenue was generated from this very small thing that you did for whatever on and then rinse and repeat. I mean, the change is so dramatic. And so I do think measurement really becomes this theme that grows from nothing to everything in marketing during this time period. Next, I think fragmented distribution is just super obvious, right? There’s more channels, more context, more chances to succeed and more chances to fail. And I remember chasing after every new thing, like that was gonna be what made it work, right? We’re just not on this platform or we’re not doing this campaign over here. We haven’t optimized for this size or for video…there was a point where it was like, “Well if we just do more if we just do more webcasts, webinars.” We used to call it webinars crack. Everyone wants a webinar, webinars crack. And it became short form video. If we just get more short form video, we’re gonna solve it.
Aaron Peterson (19:37)
I feel like the same thing also happened with Twitter where it was like, it made sense to be on Twitter if you were the type of company or brand that wanted to be on there doing short form messaging all the time. But I remember being at points where people were saying to us, you know, we should have a Twitter account and I thought, “Well, who’s going to put content on that regularly?” You’ve got to be engaged with the platform that you’re on with the type of content and the type of engagement. And I felt, actually, a sense of relief in one of my most recent roles when I was given the authority to say, “Okay, only focus on the social platforms that actually make sense for us and our brand and our audience.” And like we don’t need to pay attention to any of the other ones, which was again a total turnaround from where we used to be.
Jamie Jones (20:25)
And we’re just showing our age by calling it Twitter and not X, but it will always be Twitter in my book, and there will always be a blue bird. So it just is. But yes, absolutely. We both experienced just chasing the new hot thing. And I think because B2B is so different than B2C or D2C, and I think too often B2B saw the sexiness of what B2C and D2C were doing and thought, we’ll just translate it, right? We’ll just be on that platform too.
I mean, truthfully, thinking about some of the corporate brands I work for being on TikTok is like a horrifying thought to me. So let’s just leave that there. But yes, lots of channels, fragmented distribution doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting it all right. And I think it leads into the third point, which maybe is kind of overlap, which is just extreme complexity. A big idea, a great marketing campaign, or a thought, it only takes you so far because we have technology and we have tools that require execution, skills, and governance. Privacy comes in as well, and consumer control forces marketing to be permission-based and creative first. So we get a lot, but we kind of lose a lot too. And it goes back to that conversation we had in part one about the madmen days. Like I watched those episodes and just long for a time when being a marketer seemed that simple because we’ve lived in a very complex world of marketing for better or for worse. But I do think, what I feel, and and I think you and I both have seen this in our own careers, is that, you know, marketing becomes this hybrid discipline where creative story, storytelling executed with analytic precision and operational discipline. And we don’t get that credit, right? I think everybody thinks we’re only the former, but the latter is really where we really make our way within the company if we’re able to do those things. So we wear a lot of hats, if you haven’t noticed, in marketing.
Aaron Peterson (22:24)
And luckily we look great in them as well.
Jamie Jones (22:28)
I wore my headphones today, but I guess I should have worn a hat today.
Aaron Peterson (22:32)
Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Jamie Jones (22:35)
Yeah, I mean, as I said earlier, we could dive into a lot of these pieces, these fence post pieces along the way and go a lot deeper. I definitely want to talk more about streaming. I think mobile is a huge piece of it as well. But, you know, we definitely understand that technology was such a big part of what happened during this time. If you used it appropriately, anything was at your disposal and everything could be the world was your oyster. But it was finding a balance of investing in data hygiene and simple internal governments that actually became more important than just having the budget for the tool. And I saw firsthand how much misalignment internally actually didn’t allow for success, even when the budget was there to buy the tools that were, you know, gonna solve the problem.
Aaron Peterson (23:27)
Yeah, it’s crazy how that works out. Yeah. Thanks, Jamie, for the rapid fire history lesson on the tech driven t transformation of marketing from the 90s through the early 2020s. Those of you listening, did we miss anything? You know, let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear more from you and to hear what major milestones or or activities that happen throughout these time periods you think were really influential or just had a really big impact on you and your career. Next episode we’re gonna flip the lens and look at where we go from here, so where we think we’re heading. So, yeah, Jamie thanks again for schooling us.
Jamie Jones (24:01)
Thanks, Aaron. You were the real educator last time, but I appreciate that. If you’re our listeners and you enjoyed this, please subscribe, drop a review, send us one ad that you remember from the 90s because I love to do a look at those old ads. They make me feel so happy. Aaron, as we always do, do you want to lead us out with the One Last Thing?
Aaron Peterson (24:21)
Yeah, sure. So, one last thing that I was reading about this week that I thought was really kind of interesting was AdAge put out a first-ever Confidence Index. Okay. And this was a study of marketers to gauge their confidence in the marketing industry. It’s the first time they’ve ever done a study like this, and they just released this in July of ‘26. So it just came out like a week or so ago. Interesting, just a couple of little findings from it I thought I’d share.
One – overall, only about 64 percent of people who responded to it felt that they were confident in the future of marketing, the where it’s heading. And that was like any bit of somewhat confidence, not like excited confidence. In fact, only 14 percent said that they felt like our industry was in a good or excellent place. So everybody else was kind of in that more middle phase of, “it’s okay, I guess,” which I think is an interesting thing to see. And then this isn’t exactly the brightest note on here, but nearly six in ten, so not quite 60 percent expect conditions to worsen over the next six months. But I think what that’s probably coming from is the fact that we’re still having a lot of societal environmental factors that are impacting the industry. There are things that are impacting the way that money is being spended. I think there’s also a lot of uncertainty just because there’s a lot of potential change that could happen, right? Like there’s the big talk about whether or not there’s going to be like the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger and things like that that could potentially have some major impacts on the industry. And that could be some of the things that are making people feel this way.
Jamie Jones (26:11)
That’s super interesting. I hadn’t read that, but based on the conversations that we’ve had offline, it pretty much mirrors how we feel about the industry these days as well. I think it’s also a perfect interlude into our next conversation about where do we go from here, right? I think we probably should cover a little bit about how do we get that confidence back, that swagger? I know in one of the earlier episodes I talked about marketing being like, he department I thought to be in, right? Like, why would I want to be in sales? I want to be in marketing. So, like, let’s get our swagger back. I want to talk about that on the next episode.
Aaron Peterson (26:47)
Yeah, I’m all I’m all for that and let’s let’s start the movement. So we’ll start having the conversation and then we’ll bring more people on board and eventually, it’ll just spread from there.
Jamie Jones (26:57)
Love it. Sounds good.
Aaron Peterson (26:59)
Alright. Thanks everyone for joining us and hope to see you next time. Thanks for tuning in.
Jamie Jones (27:02)
Bye everyone, thank you.