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