Imran Farooq sniffed, ‘well, goodbye old friend’, he thought, finally pulling the plug.

Weeeeeee booooopppp er chhhh er chhhhhhh, the fax machine replied, before falling silent. Alas, this would be its final hurrah.

‘Nothing personal, yeah? Email just does it better’.

Still, Imran mused as he lugged it to the tip, he would rather miss the days of the machine in the corner of the office suddenly springing to life and depositing copious amounts of paper containing unsolicited marketing.

Those were the days, when all you needed was a business directory of fax numbers, and hey presto, your marketing could be sent to clients on a mass-scale.

Ah the glory days when marketing was through newspapers and radio, and those posters on the walls of Tube Escalators. 

Well, sort of. Relying on untrackable brochures and flyers wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, all that money for so little reward, half the time they probably ended up in the bin anyway.

And as useful as chain emails were at the time as a marketer, he had to admit it was nice to be- mostly- rid of junk mail these days.

It’s easy to forget that before the millennium, marketing consisted, for the most part, of traditional, analogue methods of communication such as newsletters, magazines and billboards.

There was no easier way to get your company message in front of an audience than getting an ad in that prime dinner time tv slot.

Sure, they didn’t have google analytics effortlessly measuring how many people had responded to leaflets, but most companies had it easy. After all, you didn’t have to pander to your potential customers when you had them cornered. A browse of the tv schedule to see what programme your customer demographic might be likely to watch, pay for an ad and bobs your uncle. 

The world of marketing was at peace.

But in the mid-90s, something came along to shatter the tranquil world of marketers forever. 

The internet.

Our story starts in a newly globalised world where vast numbers of people became connected at the click of a button.

Many marketers were initially skeptical of the usefulness of this new tool to their trade. After all, the marketing environment had trucked along nicely for 100’s of years without this ‘internet marketing’ and they knew what they were doing, thank you very much.

However, as the internet became more accessible; the power of the web became clear.

The internet offered marketers the ability to reach a global audience on a mass scale in a way that would have been impossible just a decade before. Companies began to create websites and build an online presence.

However, the more companies embraced this technology, the more consumers started to gain control. Early internet browsers like Nexus, Lynx and Mosaic, made it easy for internet users to find and scroll millions of websites.

For the first time, consumers were spoilt for choice, over-run with competing marketing messages and becoming increasingly hard to reach using traditional methods.

In 1998, Google launched and around the same time, online chat forums, the pre-cursors of social media, were growing in popularity. Consumers relationship with marketing began to change as they looked to non-traditional media to share and search for information about products and services, rather than having marketing unavoidably pushed upon them.

Left with little choice, marketers had to adapt quickly to stay ahead of their competition.

One of these early champions of internet marketing was Imran Farooq.

A successful marketer by trade, Imran saw the potential of so called ‘internet marketing’ for the future of business and unlike others, wasn’t afraid to embrace it. E-marketing, as it had come to be known, had presented marketers with many challenges but also great new opportunities.

That was when Imran had a brainwave.

It seemed to him that the issue was technology growth was exponential while organisations struggled to keep up. Technology was being adopted by consumers quicker than marketers could figure out how to incorporate it. 

But like with any new piece of kit, they first had to learn how to use it!

Marketers had these incredible new tools and networks available to them but how could they take advantage, if they hadn’t yet been taught how to operate them?!

It was hardly surprising that marketers- working professionals with busy lives- were struggling to get to grips with this new technology, let alone miraculously figure out how to incorporate it into their business’s marketing plan!

What they needed, thought Imran, was specialist training, a flexible distance learning course which would educate them in these new technologies and develop their skillset as marketers for the modern day whilst maintaining their work commitments.

It seemed a no brainer but to Imran’s amazement, he had spotted a gap in the market!

In 1996, Imran founded MMC Learning in conjunction with Manchester metropolitan University with the aim of educating marketers in the latest innovations in the field.

Around the same time, the internet also began to open the door to new ways of educating. Online learning, utilising the internet to deliver distance courses, was beginning to take off. Early software such as PlaceWare and WebEx allowed study centres to experiment with web conferencing and webinars.

However, creating a brand new qualification which would give marketers the skillset they needed to thrive, all from the comfort of their own home, was easier said than done.

Despite huge advancements, the internet was far from being advanced enough to deliver an entire, professional qualification with! Those who remember the achingly slow speeds of dial up connection using a landline and modem before the days of broadband, settling in for the wait for a website to load with a magazine kept specially next to the computer, will testify the internet was far from reliable!

If that didn’t make Imran’s job hard enough, he was shooting blind. How did one go about creating a qualification in an area which hadn’t yet fully formed?! What was ‘e-marketing’ exactly? What specific skills did marketers need to know? There were no blueprints after all!

To understand the scale of the task, let’s take a look at how ‘e-marketing’ was evolving and the skills Imran would need to impart to learners.

By the early 2000’s the internet had improved dramatically. With the rollout of broadband, what was once slow and clunky began to transform into what we know today. 

As the millennium dawned, marketing became more web-centric. Traditionally businesses used various marketing efforts; the internet was just one of various mediums that marketing messages were shared though, including traditional tv and newspaper advertising. But as ‘e-marketing’ gained dominance, marketers realised the opportunities for growth and started exploring online channels.

• Search marketing and Search Engine Optimisation

As the internet grew and searches yielded more results, a new problem emerged for marketers, how to get their business to that all important first place? After all, who goes beyond the first page on google?

Getting the coveted top spot could be achieved through paid advertising- shelling out to have your product or service placed higher in the listings as an advertisement.

Or you could tr