15 Things That Didn't Exist When I Started In This Industry
Black Friday (in the UK) - Boxing Day was the big sale day back then, and Christmas shopping peak was just in December.
Meta Ads - Facebook launched some advertising opportunities back in 2007, but you couldn’t advertise on Instagram until 2013, and Meta Ads as we currently know wasn’t launched until 2021.
Pinterest Ads - basically we were all just using social to be social.
TikTok
Google Shopping Ads - around the time that I started working we were given the first iteration of PLA’s (Product Listing Ads), but it was definitely not the shopping beast that it’s grown to over the years.
Bid strategies - the early years of my career in PPC was spent downloading keyword performance, making manual bid adjustments in a spreadsheet, and then uploading the new bids back into Google. Seems like such a chore looking back.
Google Ads - long live AdWords! Adwords become Google Ads in 2018.
Experiments (within Google Ads) - my personal favourite addition to the platform.
Performance Max campaigns.
Demand Gen campaigns.
ChatGPT - talk of AI was purely for movies and we all feared Terminator and iRobot style takeovers.
Slack - we were all about phonecalls (on deskphones) and emails.
Zoom / Teams / Meet - we would regularly have 8 hours of travelling for a 40 minute in-person meeting.
Targeting all devices in the same campaign - we used to have to run separate campaigns within AdWords to run on mobiles. Seems so mad now.
Chrome extensions - all our favourite time saving tools were only a dream.
What a walk down memory lane that was. This makes me realise how much “slower” we were at doing everything back then, but more so just how fast paced we all have to be in this industry, just to keep up with the changes. And yes, this has definitely made me feel old!
