The Limited Era began in 1900 and began to wane in 1995. As the name implies, media creation and distribution were limited to those with the required capital to participate, predominantly businesses, and its channels operated to meet the needs of message distribution by the dominant group. As a result of these limitations, the total volume of noise in the Limited Media Era was relatively low. It gave birth to our first Golden Age of Marketing (1955-1970), the rise of mega advertising agencies and the huge emphasis on branding, and then it brought us the internet and email, followed by social media and its predominant platforms Facebook and Twitter.
Significantly, the concept of marketing—the one the vast majority of us still use—was created and iterated many times throughout the Limited Era. But it wasn’t until June 24, 2009 that the underlying foundation of our media environment changed, and the Infinite Media Era began. On that day, the data clearly show that individuals overtook businesses to become the largest and most powerful creators of media. From that point forward, business was no longer master of the media environment. Its master became the individual, and all media channels began to optimize the message distribution of individual media creators.