Pages: 131-140
Introduction. The past two decades have witnessed a profound transformation of digital marketing, both as a managerial practice and as a field of academic inquiry. This paper offers a narrative review of this transformation, organized around four overlapping eras: the web infrastructure era of the early 2010s, in which the operational foundations of digital marketing capabilities were established; the social analytics era of the mid-2010s, in which monitoring tools, search-based AI applications and the systematic study of online consumer influence emerged; the maturation era of the late 2010s and the pandemic shock of 2020-2022, in which algorithmic ad delivery became the operational default and consumer behavior was substantially reshaped; and the AI-mediated era of 2023-2026, in which generative AI, fully algorithmic campaign types and privacy-related signal loss have redefined the conditions of digital advertising.
Aim of the study. For each era, the paper identifies the dominant technological capabilities, the corresponding consumer-behavior questions and the main research approaches developed in response. Three short illustrative cases drawn from Romanian small and medium e-commerce settings are used to ground the conceptual discussion in contemporary empirical practice. The review concludes with a synthesis of cross-era continuities and discontinuities, with implications for the design of empirical research in digital marketing and with directions for future inquiry in the increasingly algorithmic and generative-AI-mediated marketing environment.
