Streamyx

Advertising is rapidly becoming the backbone of marketing. Different firms opt to different mediums of advertising in accordance with the nature of a product. Today, Internet Advertising has become one of the most up-to-date and fastest medium of making products popular.

At the age of infancy, when there was no concept of World Wide Web, Internet consisted of several bulletin board systems (BBS) spread throughout the region. The Internet world was totally changed after the development of WWW in 1991 by CERN. This system was intended to be a medium for many users to access a server, at the same time with no bearing on proximity.

The most effective ways of Internet Advertising are:

In 1990s, Internet Advertising became popular and the companies started building their websites. This system was the most upbeat version of Internet Advertising in the early nineties. Some examples of these sites are www.pepsi.com, www.ibm.com, and www.adiva.com (a personal favorite). The only drawback with this ideology is that the users have to type the web address of the desired company into their browser, in order to view its page. So, the companies started posting their web addresses on television, billboards and on other forms of media.

A website, www.geocities.com?gave birth to a new form of advertising, offering a layman a chance to post his/her own homepage. Geocities placed a banner at the top and/or bottom of every page that was displayed off of their server. This way, Geocities got free advertising each time somebody was served a page from one of their member's sites (as all sites were hosted on Geocities hardware). This developed into the banner ad, now a common form of Internet advertising found throughout the WWW.

Electronic mail is another major form of Internet Advertising. A few companies began to amass collections of personal e-mail addresses with the intention of selling those lists to companies wishing to mass market those addresses. This form of advertising, also known as "spam mailing", is now predominantly used by adult sites and other small companies with little ability to use the other two forms of Internet advertising stated above.

Companies like, ford.com and eye4u.com use the three design strategy of advertising. The companies have built more interactive websites use full color and animation to deliver a corporate image to the consumer.

Silicon Graphics International is the company developing new form of Internet Protocol which is known VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). Its a three-dimensional version of HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language). This new technology will soon be incorporated into both banner advertisements and in corporate websites to create dynamic advertisements which will draw more visitors to their sites.

In the future, sites like candystand.com, where gaming is the main draw, will become more rich in media, streaming audio and video, with dynamic content streamed along side the advertisement, appealing to the user's pre-programmed preferences. One site that is attempting to develop this type of site is Intel Corporation. The manufacturer of most microprocessors on the planet is now developing a site for their latest microchip, the Pentium III Processor.

In short, the future of advertising is as doubtful as its origin was. Sooner or later, all three types of advertising will converge into a form where the banner ads will become interactive, and slowly but surely escort into the corporate site where mailing lists will update the user on changes to the site, bringing back the user to the website. With faster download speeds, advertising will become more striking in content and presentation. Information about the products or services will be viewed alongside the video, allowing the user to be much more informed than on any other media.

Maaz Iqbal is a copywriter and an SEO-based content writer. He maintains a blog which is, http://advertisinginnovations.blogspot.com/