The Down Economy, Helped Digital Get Up

"Everything has to work in this economy. If the economy hadn't dropped the way it did, we would have been on auto pilot and not experimented the way we did. Our production quality online is better than our broadcast."

- Jim Farley, group VP-global marketing at Ford Motor Co.

I think the point Mr. Farley is making is a valid one. Looking back on the past half- century the stage was perfectly set for the Internet to become fully integrated in the lives of Americans and people throughout the world.

It all started when the USSR, who else, launched Sputnik in 1957. The launch of Sputnik catapulted the United States to try and regain their technological lead over the USSR. Skip ahead almost 40 years, the effort that the US had put into researching technology, along with a little help from their friends - the British, was finally paying off. And in the 1990s the Internet was estimated to have grown by 100 percent per year! In addition, as of 2009 there are over 1.67 billion Internet users.

The economic recession took effect as a result of a mixture of things, however, its timing was impeccable in relation to the rise of the Internet. Just has people were starting to figure out how great a tool the Internet was, large companies began losing money and having to pull back advertising costs (not the best method but none the less very prevalent). This caused companies and advertising agencies to get creative and turn to a new media that had previously been untapped, the Internet. If the economy had not caved, would advertisers had a reason to look to other, less expensive methods to get their point across? I think that it is hard to say, however, I do believe that the process of adaptation would have been significantly slower. In the end, the recession allowed the world to step back and analyze was to improve on the status quo.