30 Years in Digital Marketing: From Dial-Up Modems to AI

How it started

I was 17 the first time I connected to the internet. Not through a sleek fibre line. Through a phone socket, a screaming modem, and the very real risk of my mum picking up the receiver and destroying 40 minutes of progress on a 2MB download.
The internet back then was a strange place. Not strange in a bad way. Strange the way anything new and uncharted tends to be. Personal websites about obscure hobbies. Forums where strangers fixed each other’s problems for free, no affiliate link required. A collective sense that this thing belonged to everyone, and everyone was still working out what to do with it.
Nobody was optimising anything. Nobody was running A/B tests on a homepage headline. You put something up because you had something to say, and if three people from three different countries read it, that felt like a small miracle.

Why that history matters

Three decades on, I run a digital marketing agency. I’ve had a front-row seat to every major shift this industry has been through, not as a case study but as someone operating through it in real time.
The first banner ads. The SEO gold rush. The Facebook’s pivot to video (the first one, and the second one). The influencer era. The cookie apocalypse. The AI everything. The hype cycles arrive with great noise, and most of them eventually settle into something more modest and more useful than the headlines promised.
Having seen every wave doesn’t make you nostalgic. It makes you hard to fool.
That’s a useful thing to be in this business. When a new platform arrives with breathless promises, experience is what lets you ask the right questions early: does this actually change how people make decisions, or is it a new coat of paint on the same wall? The answer shapes where you put your clients’ time and money. Getting it right, or at least getting it less wrong than the next agency, is the job.

What surviving every trend actually teaches you

The most important thing twenty-plus years in digital teaches you isn’t tactical. The platforms are rented land. Every audience you build on someone else’s algorithm, someone else can take away. The only durable asset is the relationship with the person on the other side of the screen: their trust, their loyalty, their reason to come back.
That principle transferred from Yahoo to Google to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok to wherever everyone is looking next. Technology changes. Human behaviour changes much more slowly. The agencies that understand that distinction are the ones still around after a decade. We’re one of them, which, given the pace of this industry, is its own kind of achievement.

The honest part

I won’t pretend it’s always been a smooth ride. There’s a version of digital marketing done well, useful, well-timed, respectful of people’s attention, and a version done badly, which most of us have experienced far too many times as consumers. The difference isn’t the budget. It’s judgment. And judgment is mostly the product of getting things wrong enough times to know better, which is a more expensive education than it sounds.
Starting out when this industry was still being invented meant developing that judgment early, without guardrails, on live campaigns with real money. No playbook existed. Mostly just learning the hard way and hoping the client didn’t notice. Looking back, that was the actual training.
The internet got more complicated. That’s exactly where experience earns its keep.
So yes, old enough to remember what the internet was like before it got complicated and young enough to still find the next version of it worth paying attention to. The 17-year-old with the screaming modem didn’t know what he was getting into. Thirty years later, neither does anyone else, and that’s still what makes it interesting.