{"id":9368,"date":"2026-07-07T13:04:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T13:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/?p=9368"},"modified":"2026-07-07T13:29:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T13:29:11","slug":"two-decades-of-digital-marketing-research-from-web-based-consumer-influence-to-ai-mediated-marketing-decisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/?p=9368","title":{"rendered":"Two Decades of Digital Marketing Research: From Web-Based Consumer Influence to AI-Mediated Marketing Decisions"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u00a0Pages: 131-140<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Introduction<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>

Aim of the study<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0Pages: 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1855,1859],"tags":[1945,103,1668,1918,292,1944,919],"coauthors":[1914],"class_list":["post-9368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-1855","category-2026-vol-43-issue-1-may","tag-algorithmic-delivery","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-consumer-behavior","tag-digital-marketing","tag-e-commerce","tag-narrative-review","tag-social-media","jel-l86","jel-m31","jel-m37","jel-o33"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9368"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9373,"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9368\/revisions\/9373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9368"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manager.faa.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=9368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}