What I call “classic marketing” are all things that have been established, forms of advertising for the past 50+ years such as television, newspapers, envelopes, billboards and radio. What I call “internet marketing” are all new forms of advertising only recently established in the business such as search engines, social networks, banner ads and mobile media. The integration of these two mediums is one of the axes of this article and how well they will be in contact over the next year, according to projections of market and business planning. We enter into a new and interesting time that will feature many new services, advertising and great opportunities for your company to see the return on investment.

First it was Mail, which was first enacted as an official system all the way back to 2200 BC and perhaps further, the government and major merchants of the times would send mailers to wealthy individuals hoping to obtain donations or customers. Then Newsprint appeared in the mid 17th century, it was the middle of the day and its creation has been well accepted and advertised as any other form of publication was available other than the author of a book, which was expensive at the time. Then came Billboards as lithography has become widespread and even exploded after the creation of the motor vehicle when citizens would increasingly use motorways, giving them more visibility. Then you had the radio come triumphantly into the scene, revolutionizing the way people communicate and be entertained on a daily basis. Last of the traditional types of marketing was TV and the TV did explode the advertising market, entire industries have been built around it until now when the average person has 3-4 televisions in their homes.

Then in the 80’s there was the Internet, it was not anything near the behemoth it is today, but it was innovative and very useful to government and science. The first advertising was Banner Ads and was pioneered by a company that was sub-corp. of Sears and IBM. Today, these types of ads are still effective and widely used by many top sites. Then came the search engines, creating a way to find Web sites without having to know a directory or URL directly, it opened the door for PPC and SEO to create a multi-billion industry. Social Networks began popping up online and then when Myspace attained millions of users massive ad campaigns were launched targeting those potential clients and created another multi-billion dollar industry. Last with the invention of the Mobile Web and Cell Phone Internet, Mobile Media flourished and now Smart Phones make it more profitable than ever.

Now that I have defined the major markets that each category refers to I would like to discuss the current situation of each of these mediums. Conventional marketing has seen a significant reduction of investment and return on investment with the advent of the Internet, television is the only demographic group that is still growing. The success of newspapers and shippers have fallen down drastically all the time, boards have become effective only for local products and the radio has almost disappeared in some parts of the country. When the decline began each industry realized it was time or get off the train, so they started to integrate their services in the Internet, by forcing a piece of the pie that had been removed. Radio got Pandora and the other various Internet Radio services, Newspapers began creating digital copies of the daily paper and Mail has been nearly eaten up by the Internets quick and cost effective E-Mail systems. Even television has made the need for mid-range of services available online and sites like Hulu have been created. According to polls in 2011 84% of the U.S. population had Internet access in some form in their household. Market analysis show that by 2015 Internet Marketing will account 25% of all ad spending in America. The different forms of Internet marketing have proven extremely successful, banner ads and social networks moving along strong niche and many have been created to enable marketers to reach customers directly, which showed an intrinsic value of their products or services. PPC and SEO consist of the majority of marketing dollars online making Search Engine the most invested in and Mobile Media is exploding at the moment as Smart Phones become more prevalent.

It is inevitable, in theory, that over the next two decades they will slowly merge into one multi-media delivery system, most likely in a mode we cannot foresee, as we do not have the technological advancements yet. But what we can foresee is that they will, in majority, become one large Internet based medium. With the merging, it allows for new forms of marketing to develop such as T.V. Banner Ads, Radio PPC Campaigns and Internet Based Digital Billboards. It is a new marketing frontier and if you have not already gotten on-board this is the time. If you are a business that plans on operating in the next decades you need to create websites and advertising campaigns online, you need to follow the changes in the market that are projected and lastly you need to stay open to new technological developments and not turn a blind eye to huge investment possibilities that appear in the next few years.

Internet Marketing gives businesses of any size access to the mass market at an affordable price. Also Internet Marketing focuses on advertising to refined groups of people who are looking for your services whereas conventional focuses on pushing goods or services to as many viewers at once as possible. In this Digital Age we cannot try to cling with the marketing tactics of the past, the world is ever changing and so must we. At the moment Internet Marketing is the frontier, fifty years from now it will be something we can’t comprehend at the moment. Conventional methods should still be a large part of your budget but as the years pass and the markets merge, where will you be if you have no website.