Kevin and I remember the world pre-Internet, before the World Wide Web, before email, before digital marketing.
Our dad owned a public relations and marketing company. As a kid in the 1990’s, I spent many weekends in the office developing black and white photographs, in a darkroom that smelled of chemicals. I would then stuff the photographs along with press releases on A4 headed paper into envelopes, for them to be posted around the UK.
This was my first contact with marketing.
I got my first modem for Christmas 1995 and my first email address soon after. No World Wide Web yet, just Bulletin Board Systems.
Soon came the World Wide Web, mostly read only.
Later, came websites where you could submit data. Often called Web 2.0 (read and write).
Later still came what was commonly known as Web 3.0 (read, write and execute) which allowed you to interact with websites.
As the technology used within the Internet progressed, so did the technology of digital marketing – text personalisation, cookies, usage of user data stored in CRMs, etc.
25 years after getting my first email account, I still thought back to my days in the darkroom with images and press releases. I thought – why are images still static? Why aren’t they personalised for each recipient? The technology must exist…
Kevin and I looked around, some companies were indeed doing image personalisation. We looked at them – and saw flaws. Some were difficult to use, some had obvious bugs, some were very slow, some hadn’t had any development in years.
We knew that with our technical backgrounds, we could do better.
Moments later, OKZest was born…
- Paul Richardson, Co-founder
