Internet Advertising as a Career: Trends and Strategies

Introduction: The Internet Economy and Career Opportunity

Using the internet, entrepreneurs can run sophisticated businesses from virtually anywhere. That is why places like Boulder, Colorado, now have some of the densest concentrations of technology-related businesses in the country, most of them small independent firms. The desire for and availability of more lifestyle choices will continue to drive economic decentralization. Splintering consumer tastes are also moving the industry away from its centralized past. Cable, satellite broadcasting, and the internet all feed Americans' appetites for customization. This trend has helped create three new broadcast networks and more specialized media, while the market share of mass network programming has declined sharply. Larger media companies now depend on small-scale producers to meet new consumer demands.

More successful internet businesses have been spawned by Caltech graduate Bill Gross than by any other person on the planet. Through idealab!, his Southern California-based incubator, he has launched dozens of enterprises now worth many hundreds of millions of dollars, including e-commerce pioneers like CitySearch and eToys. At last count, there were more than 100 million web pages. Not long ago, pundits, experts, and internet aficionados could be heard urging CEOs—that notoriously technophobic group—to sit down at their computers and enter the strange new world of the web. Today, many chief executives have done just that, witnessing the online revolution firsthand by visiting not only their own companies' websites, but also high-profile destinations such as Amazon.com, the Drudge Report, and Yahoo!. There is now far more you can do than simply buy books or advertise your company online.

Industry Growth and Revenue Trends

Internet advertising's comeback has been progressing quite nicely. Industry revenue for the second quarter of 2003 was $1.66 billion, up 14% from the same period a year earlier, and nearly 2% higher than in the first quarter. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's (IAB) regular Internet Ad Revenue report, conducted in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers, numbers for the first half of the year show U.S. internet advertising bringing in $3.3 billion—10.5% higher than the same period in 2002. Internet advertising encompasses developing visual and written content for client web pages, crafting online advertisements, devising strategy for online promotions, and monitoring website and online traffic.

Core Principles of Internet Advertising

In the midst of all the hype, speculation, and self-interested predictions about the internet and advertising, three facts seem apparent and obvious:

Internet advertising is big, and will get much bigger. The majority of business-to-business marketing will be conducted via the internet within a few years. On the consumer side, there is a much greater level of social, psychological, and cultural density to contend with.

Direct marketing principles and architecture are made-to-order for the internet. The web is interactive. Direct marketers have been practicing interactive communication since the beginning of their discipline. The interactive nature of the internet is obvious to all but the least informed—a category that unfortunately includes most large advertising agencies and many large traditional corporations.

The internet radically facilitates connecting with customers. It also radically facilitates invading their privacy, which will prove to be a significant issue in the years ahead. But whether you call it relationship marketing, one-to-one marketing, CRM, or anything else, building those connections is considerably easier on the web.