The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

Comments on the Future

Changing Rules and the Rules of Change

Jeff Cole, Professor, University of Southern California

After only a few years it is already easy to see that the internet (and now wireless technologies) has changed the rules of everything. Everything that we have learned and become accustomed to has been affected, and in most cases, transformed. Nowhere is this more true than in the world of advertising and the ways in which we reach consumers with commercial messages.

While the origins of the internet can be traced back to 1969 as a federal project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the World Wide Web as we use it today began in the early 1990s. Advertising, or any kind of commercial activity or message, was actually illegal on the internet until the end of 1995. By the time Congress got around to lifting the ban on commercial activity on “its” internet, buying, selling, and advertising were already commonplace. By allowing, if not embracing, private interests, Congress, whether it realized it or not (and it probably did not), was forever changing the advertising business and a whole lot of other businesses as well.

An advertising executive retiring in 1995 with 40 years’ experience could have looked back on a stable, exciting, and rewarding career. As dynamic as the business must have felt, in retrospect it (like the television and print businesses) really did not change that dramatically during the course of those years, especially in comparison ...