“Ever since people have had something to sell, we’ve been marketing. But the effectiveness of those marketing methods have waxed and waned over thousands of years, and as consumers and their technologies advanced at a more and more rapid pace, marketers have had to change their game.” (20)

Until very recently, “marketing consisted almost entirely of ‘Outbound Marketing,’ that is, marketing that interrupts the consumer, talking at them, instead of with them.” Print Ads, Magazines, Billboards, Radio, Television and Telemarketing represented our only collective communication mediums until the emergence of the Digital Age in 1973 (20).

With internet and email marketing came the concept of ‘Spam’ when we learned the term after a “Phoenix law firm conducted the first automated, large-scale example of spamming consumers” when they “advertised their services by posting on several thousand newsgroups” in 1994 (20). Most recently, the United States presidential campaign of 2016 popularized the term “Fake News” for the false and fraudulent content circulating in mainstream media, and since then, the term “has been used more or less continuously by world leaders, as well as by countless political operatives, journalists and ordinary people. As a rough guide, a Google News search of “fake news” throws up 5 million results, and (one month into) 2018 the phrase had been used about two million times on Twitter.” (21)

As an Inbound marketer, I call this revelation of the questionable authenticity of content, and critical evaluation of the media, fantastic news.