The early existence of markup on the Internet began in the early 1990s, when simple, text-based websites were favorably used to offer information about products or services around the world. Bristol-Myers Squibb was the first company to officially launch an online marketing campaign. A US-based pharmaceutical company, Bristol-Myers Squibb, launched the use of online marketing to basically develop public awareness of the use of a certain drug called “Excedrin”. During the 1997 tax season, Excedrin was declared by law and marketing firms to be a “tax headache” supplement to online advertising websites. Bristol-Myers provided a free online sample of the drug to American Internet users.
According to Linda Himelstein of Business Week, the use of the World Wide Web in promoting Excedrin resulted in a number of good responses from Bristol-Myers. Himelstein also wrote in her article that in just a day or two, Brtistol-Myers has already estimated 30,000 names added to its online client list. Standardized technology industries such as Microsoft and IBM began incorporating their Internet providers and various software programs into existing Bristol-Myer marketing campaigns. Both industries also began wasting millions of dollars of online marketing efforts to make way for the Bristol-Myer campaign. Various websites such as Yahoo are said to be one of the online companies that were able to quickly acquire a lot of profit from marketing. Yahoo successfully targeted the type of messages “never seen before” in the online marketing industry. The highly trafficked website tracked the visits each online ad gets per day. In 2000, Yahoo forced many online marketing companies to cut their online advertising revenue. During the same year, Yahoo reported that companies’ customer bases shrank during the “Cooling Down Stage” of the US economy.
Spending used for Internet marketing in the US, Canada, and other neighboring countries totaled $300 billion in 1996. In 1994, the average online marketing figure was $175 billion, which is spent on traditional advertising campaigns in a year. The industry began to grow as the number of Internet users and home-based entrepreneurs continued to rise in the United States in the mid-1990s. In 1997, the online advertising industry’s budget grew to $1 billion. of dollars. Experienced online marketing and advertising writer Bill McRea wrote in his article that one of the most popular online marketing companies in the US and some European countries today is “Houston Online Marketing”. According to McRea, Houston online marketing has several advantages that rank well with affiliate online marketing companies in the US, including several Western and European countries. The benefits provided by McRea include the following:
• Online consumers can easily log in to the website and learn the general characteristics of the product or service at any time of the day.
• These companies could save more money due to the website’s need to reduce sales force fees and online advertising expenses.