The Most Important Person in the Whole Wide World is YOU!
The Advent of One-to-One Marketing
With the 20th century going around its last bend in the track, the media landscape seemed to be settling into a reliable existence, expanding and prolonging its presence in our daily lives but otherwise not changing too much. More magazines catering to various subjects and enthusiasms made more precise targeting of smaller audience segments possible. The explosion of Network Cable as a medium meant a greater diversity of programming for a wider selection of tastes. Advertising seemed to have settled on a collection of tried-and-true methods that didn’t require change but would only need ongoing improvement. Targeted advertising was still being done the old-fashioned way – a combination of survey data indicating audience compositions of specific media vehicles and assuming targets based on content – even if the content was starting to get more diverse and speak to more specifically defined cohorts.
After all, how could an advertiser place an ad in front of ONLY the right person at ONLY the right time? The frameworks for targeting in a way other than how it had been done and the technology for doing so weren’t present.
And then, just as the last decade of the 20th century was getting underway, two things happened that changed everything.
Life’s a Pitch… Then You Buy[i]
In 1992, Don Peppers, an infamous advertising executive with a penchant for using outlandish methods of self-promotion (“He has sent flowers to prospective clients and even posted life-sized cardboard cutouts of himself outside their homes,” as reported in the March 1, 1990 edition of the New York Times by none other than then-tech-editor and now-advertising-thought-leader Randall Rothenberg) teamed up with Martha Rogers, also an advertising executive with a PhD and a background in consumer behavior, to form a consulting company: Peppers and Rogers. In 1993, they published a book that would turn out to be not only the best advertisement for a company since Apple’s MacIntosh 1984 ad but maybe the most influential business book of all time, The One to One Future.
In their book, Peppers and Rogers revolutionized the marketing landscape with their advocacy for what they called “one-to-one marketing.” They argued that the future of marketing lies in personalized, individualized customer interactions rather than broad, generalized campaigns. They highlighted the importance of understanding customer preferences, building detailed customer profiles, and creating tailored marketing messages to foster loyalty and long-term engagement.
The roots of one-to-one marketing can be traced back to early direct marketing principles laid down by Lester Wunderman. These principles emphasized personalized communication and customer engagement, laying the groundwork for more sophisticated methods. The rise of database marketing in the 1980s pushed these ideas forward by enabling businesses to collect and analyze customer data to create more specifically targeted marketing campaigns. There were scholars like Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone whose work in automation, metrics, and database usage was instrumental in developing practices to manage and use this data effectively.
“Have you ever clicked your mouse right here?”
The first online banner ad appeared in October 1994, a little over a year after The One To One Future was published. The ad ran on Hotwired.com as part of the AT&T “You Will” campaign. It was exactly two weeks after Netscape’s initial release to the world. Like all media before it, the easily accessed open internet was almost instantly commercialized with paid advertising.
Unlike all those to date, this new medium was inherently data-enabled. Though it was primitive at first, the trackability and data-richness of online advertising were obvious. If an ad ran, it could be counted (well… eventually). If a person saw and responded to the ad, that action could be tracked (well… eventually). The medium quickly became easily accessible, and the participation cost was low and became increasingly lower. The barrier to entry as a content producer was low, which meant every manner of interest could be brought to the public with relatively low friction. A proliferation of interests now had a place to manifest and attract like-minded people. From a media planning and placement perspective, that meant that targets assumptive based on content, like with print, got even more niche.
But what really got pupils to dilate and mouths to water was the prospect that a medium connected to its audience could generate data on that audience in situ of their interaction with the media and, in turn, the advertising accompanying that media.
The advent of the internet in the late 20th century provided the perfect platform for bringing Peppers and Rogers' vision to life. The internet's ability to facilitate direct and instantaneous customer communication revolutionized the marketing landscape. Websites, email marketing, and early forms of online advertising enabled more personalized interactions, aligning perfectly with one-to-one marketing principles.
Amazon, eBay, and other e-commerce players were among the first to capitalize on these opportunities. They used the internet to collect vast amounts of customer data, allowing them to offer personalized product recommendations and tailored shopping experiences. In the intervening years, sites used the audience data collected to deliver “personalized” content experiences and advertising.
The promise of trackability and accountability first drew advertisers to the web. By the mid-1990s, the landscape of media planning and buying was balanced between the tried-and-true methods of yesteryear and the dawn of a digital revolution that looked to deliver on the one-to-one hypothesis. But at the dawn of the internet media age, even with the one-to-one framework in hand, usable data was still brittle. Something was still needed. Individual sites could apply audience-supplied data as best they could. Advertisers could create myriad assets to speak to each increasingly niche segment that the proliferation of content types could corral and cordon off. However, the connective tissue that could hold the whole thing together was missing; there was no viscera to keep the loose part of the digital media body together.
The commercial web's allure lay in its capacity to offer verifiable counts of advertising and audience activity, a stark departure from the estimated figures of the past. The data available for most of the media landscape hinged largely on self-reported behavior from randomly selected audiences. While useful, these methods called for an overhaul due to potential inaccuracies. The reliability of media consumption recall was questionable, often reflecting claimed behavior over actual engagement. Within this context, the Wanamaker axiom – "I know half of my advertising works, I just don't know which half" – found its relevance, epitomizing the inherent uncertainties plaguing the advertising industry.
Something already part of the consumer web’s infrastructure would bring the whole thing to life: a digital phlogiston that would set the web on fire and make it one of the most popular and powerful advertising tools in history. A small piece of code to make the web easier for people to use became an ever-present, pernicious enabler of surveillance capitalism, selection bias, confirmation bias, and social and political sectarianism.
The cookie, “the destroyer of worlds.”
[i] This is the title of a book by Don Peppers in 1995
