How Web Advertising Started

There is now doubt that advertising, although is a less developed form, has been used ever since ancient periods to transmit messages and to pursue individuals to adhere to ideas, or increase popularity or awareness about something in the society. At the very beginning, commercials and advertising used to take the form of painted walls or rocks. In Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, messages would have been transmitted through papyrus. The messages were usually visual given the fact that too few people know how to read. They were thus expressive and focused on the categories of individuals they were addressed to. The basic principles have not changed too much over the years, and they can be still identified in the ways in which advertising agencies choose to transmit messages today. Yet, the canals of transmission have long now surpassed the walls, rocks or papyrus and nowadays most advertising takes place over the internet.

Internet advertising is known to have started developing in the 1990s. Marketing through the internet was what actually opened new borders for advertising agencies. In the 1990s many companies would have operated solely on advertising revenue and they would have offered anything from free internet access to goods and coupons. In the 2000s however the advertising industry, the internet advertising was about to face the largest change in its history once websites such as Google had been developed. This had allowed advertising agencies to focus on unobtrusive ads and relevant commercials intended to help users and not to inundate them. This has consequently led to an increased trend of interactive advertising.

More recently, web advertising has known an advertising innovation called ‘guerrilla marketing’. This strategy involves staged encounters in public places, giveaways of products and they have significantly contributed to the increased trend of interactive and embedded adds by using different websites and social network websites such as Facebook, Hi5 or MySpace.