Time Is a Flat Circle: The Return of Impressions for Zero-Click Searches

As the old saying goes: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Back in the prehistoric times before the internet when I think dinosaurs still roamed the earth, marketing largely consisted of billboard ads, print ads, TV ads, and radio ads. Marketing equaled advertising. The marketplace bought and sold advertising, and measured its success ahead of time, based entirely on the number of impressions the content owner/publisher (e.g. newspapers, TV shows, etc.) “guaranteed.”

Then the internet came along. And over the course of thirty years, this technological meteorite killed all the dinosaurs (newspapers, linear television, radio stations) who charged advertisers for “impressions” that may or may not ever happen.

Here is an example from the olden times. A newspaper’s total number of subscribers determined its advertising rate card. So an advertiser paid the publisher based on the number of copies distributed, not how many copies those subscribers actually read.

Fast forward to the dawn of the internet age, where a new term emerged – digital marketing. Soon digital marketing became just marketing, and business leaders referred to the old way of doing things as “traditional” marketing or “legacy” marketing. And if you curated those dusty relics, they weren’t very fun to talk about on first dates or at family reunions. So everyone updated their LinkedIn profiles and changed the way they made their living. And if you owned stock in Facebook and Google, you became a gazillionaire.