“When people ask why digital marketers never seem to stop learning, I often smile. It’s because the industry has never stopped changing. And when people lament learning yet more and more new things, I also smile, but more ruefully, because in an industry that never stands still, you can never be an ‘expert’ or a ‘guru’. There is always something new to learn, before you even get a chance to feel you’ve already mastered some elements. So building your knowledge on constantly shifting sands is something you need to get used to.
I started my career in London in 1991, but not in marketing. I began as a digital photo retoucher in a traditional photography studio. We created catalogue photography for Next mail order catalogues, big advertising hoarding campaigns (such as the infamous Benson & Hedges pyramids artwork) and even VHS covers that needed to be converted from Betamax sizes to VHS box sizes for the UK market (I’ve re-comped Heat, Congo and Babe amongst dozens of others).
Digital editing existed, but it wasn’t nearly as accessible or easy to use as it is these days. We worked on a Kodak imaging system that cost around half a million pounds per machine – and we had two of them. One was needed to drum scan in 10×8 positive film at thousands of lines per inch, and one was needed to output 10×8 positives which we then developed in the dark rooms downstairs before proofing under a lightbox the traditional way. We’d then need to send the finished jobs back to the client by bike courier across town. If something went wrong, technical support wasn’t a quick Google search or a live chat. We dialled into Kodak over the telephone so engineers could remotely connect to the machine.
I sat alongside the traditional retouchers who were busy masking out areas with paint brushes on positive films, re-exposing other areas and painstakingly cutting out and literally composing images out of assemble component parts. In meantime, I worked in a freezing cold air-conditioned room on a precisely calibrated screen doing the same work but digitally, drawing on steam to cups of Typhoo tea, and creating ice on bottles of Budweiser – all techniques that could not be created in-camera in a photography studio.
It feels like another lifetime.
Debbie’s career in London started before the Shard was built, and Canary Wharf was the tallest building (and take a look at how empty the skyline is around the Gherkin in this shot!)
Not long afterwards, I moved into a print artworking role, laying out magazines and journals. Within weeks, my manager walked over and casually announced that I was going to become the company’s web designer.
There was just one small detail.
I’d never been on the internet.
The next day someone arrived, spent a few hours teaching me HTML, explained how FTP and the concept of servers on the world wide web worked, showed me how to upload files to a server and then left.
That was my training.
People working in the internet industry have always been fueled by coffee! Debbie poured a lot of her earnings into this coffee shop on Tottenham Court Road in the 90s
My first web role was at Reed Elsevier, building websites for companies that could actually afford to have one. At that point, having a corporate website was still a luxury rather than an expectation, and businesses were sceptical about the longevity of this new ‘internet’ that had arrived. I worked on building websites for organisations including Astra and Glaxo Wellcome, helping shape what was, at the time, an entirely new way for businesses to communicate with the world.
After Reed Elsevier, I joined Daily Mail and General Trust, where the web was beginning to move from experimental to mainstream. I worked on This is London for the Evening Standard, This is Money – which remarkably still carries the same logo today – and Femail. Although Femail no longer exists as a standalone brand, its layout and editorial style was the pre-cursor to today’s Daily Mail website, which remains one of the most visited news websites in the world. The underlying tech in the website has changed, making the dynamic content serving experience and community management much more behaviourally driven, but no one has really touched the design. As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
Looking back, it’s fascinating to have been there while many of these firsts were taking shape. And it was thrilling to meet up with the old gang that forged a path in the ‘90s, when a huge group of us all managed to be in London on the same night in 2024 for a once-ever reunion 💚👇
The original 1990s Daily Mail website and digital team
Since those early days, I’ve watched almost every cornerstone of modern digital marketing emerge.
The internet moved from dial-up modems that tied up the household phone line to always-on broadband. Search engines became part of everyday life before Google transformed how businesses were discovered. Email marketing became mainstream. Websites evolved from online brochures into sophisticated sales platforms.
Then came social media.
Facebook changed how brands communicated with customers. YouTube transformed video. LinkedIn reshaped professional networking. Twitter introduced real-time conversations. Instagram turned visual storytelling into a marketing discipline in its own right. Smartphones put the internet into everyone’s pocket. Analytics became increasingly sophisticated. SEO evolved from keyword stuffing into technical, content-led strategy. Paid advertising became algorithm-driven. Automation became expected.
Every few years, something arrived that fundamentally altered the landscape.
Each time, we all had to learn again.
Now we’re standing at what feels like another one of those defining moments.
Artificial intelligence is already changing how we research, write, analyse data, create imagery, build software and optimise campaigns. But we’re only at the beginning. The next wave isn’t simply AI helping us complete individual tasks; it’s agentic AI, where intelligent systems can plan, reason and execute entire workflows with minimal human intervention.
That shift feels every bit as significant as the arrival of the commercial internet back in the 1990s.
There will undoubtedly be uncertainty. Some roles will change dramatically; others will disappear and entirely new careers will emerge that don’t yet have names. Just as nobody was recruiting SEO specialists, social media managers or content strategists when I started out, the next generation of digital professionals will occupy roles we can’t yet imagine.
One thing I’ve learned over the past three and a half decades is that resisting change has never been a successful strategy in digital. Curiosity has always been the competitive advantage.
Sometimes I look back and realise that I’ve worked through the birth of commercial websites, search engines, broadband, e-commerce, social media, smartphones, cloud computing and now artificial intelligence.
It’s quite a list.
It also makes me wonder whether there is any other profession that has reinvented itself so completely, so many times, within a single career.
No wonder so many people working in digital feel exhausted.
We’ve spent decades mastering one revolution after another, only to discover that the next one is already beginning.
In short, who knows?
And in conclusion, does it really matter?
In a career that hadn’t even been invented when I was in my careers advice sessions at 14 years old, the only certainty is that 5 years from now will look nothing like today, in just the same way that today looks nothing like 5 years ago.
One of the biggest new websites to launch to viral levels of adoption in recent years has been TikTok, but already that audience is ageing and another social platform will come along to supercede it.
AI is all everyone is talking about these days, but in reality, artificial intelligence has been around for a long time – I was touring the ‘smart homes’ R&D campus at BT’s Adastral Park in the early 2000s when I worked for BT PlusNet. Marvelling at smart fridges, smart lighting, smart heating and imagining how these would integrate in modern life was a lot sooner to arrive than I could’ve imagined back then.
We haven’t yet been exposed to what’s being developed in labs across the planet that will become mainstream before we know it.
So, if you want to stay ahead of the game, just keep your mind open and welcoming of change. If you spend enough time in the game, you’ll start to recognise what’s going to stick around and what’s a doozie too!
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