25 Things You'll Have to Explain to Your Kids About Marketing One Day

You can't deny it: Marketing changes a mile a minute. Just think about how different things were 10, even 5 years ago! So when we recently discovered BuzzFeed's list of 25 things you'll have to explain to your kids one day, we thought it was just begging us to create a marketing parody.

So we did!

Take a look at these 25 things you'll probably have to tell your kids about marketing one day because they're either dying as effective marketing tactics, they weren't always around, or they're already a thing of the past.

25 Things You'll Have to Explain to Your Kids About Marketing One Day

1) What direct mail was.

2) That there was this thing called the Yellowbook, and that's how people would search for local businesses.

3) How there was no such thing as internet marketing ... because there was no such thing as the internet.

4) How there was no such thing as mobile marketing either, because people's cell phones looked like this ...

And before that, this ...

5) In fact, the only way to connect to the internet was to dial in on your computer through a modem.

6) And people would get suckered into picking up cold calls from telemarketers because there was no caller ID or Do Not Call Registry.

7) You couldn't skip through TV commercials either.

8) How most websites looked something like this ...

9) And buying or renting lists were acceptable ways of growing your email marketing database.

10) How companies could spam the heck out of your inbox with no legal repercussions whatsoever.

11) And how Facebook was originally just for Harvard University students, and it was ad-free.

12) How it was once cool to have banner, skyscraper, and pop-up ads on your website (and there was a time when people didn't automatically tune them out).

13) What this big thing was used for ...

14) And how the only way to buy things without going to a physical store was through one of these.

15) How keyword stuffing,page sculpting,and buying inbound links were once considered SEO best practices.

16) And there was a time when younger demographics spent more time doing this ... 

Than doing this ...

17) How marketers pretty much had to guess about which of their marketing tactics were working because marketing analytics didn't exist.

18) And how this was the only social networking you could do ...

19) How the only thing marketers could automate was their out-of-office voicemail.

20) And that it once wasn't against the law to pay your customers to leave you positive online reviews.

21) How strangers used to knock on your door during dinner to try to sell you things.

22) How these were once the main way people consumed content ...

23) And this was once an innovative new advertising platform ...

(This is called a "radio," by the way.)

24) How marketers used to have to bug their IT departments to make changes to their websites.

25) What outbound marketing was ;-)

What else would you add to this list? Share your thoughts in the comments below!