Prior to the advent of the Online Retail model, Marketing and Adverting in the Bricks and Mortar world was a little bit less complicated- it has to be simple when you can sum it up with 4 P's!

You basically need a distribution network for the product, you build awareness around the product using Mass Media Advertising, you leverage pricing and promotions to drive trial and target consumers using Direct Marketing. You can optimize your allocation across these tactics using response rates on historical sales.

Exploding growth of the internet brought the Dot-Comboom and with it came virtual marketplaces and online retail and a whole new infrastructure of Marketing and Advertising. Now you can advertise and promote either on your own website or on other generic or specialized websites, you can advertise via Search Engine results, acquire targeted email lists to send solicitations for offers or leverage Blogs, Social Media or Viral/Word of Mouth Marketing to generate 'buzz' about your products and services. You can use server or user data to run analysis on which of these media works best for your product and even incorporate them into traditional Marketing-Mix models that will help you split your budget  between traditional and online media.

The 'Hybrid' Bricks & Clicks Advertising Model

Several traditional businesses with Bricks and Mortar business models have transitioned to the 'Bricks and Clicks' model to stay competitive in the Internet Economy. This provides a lot of synergies with their traditional business model. First of all you have a tremendous distribution at a fraction of the cost, you have better margins, 24/7 access, a very broad Assortment and much better customer service resulting from the ability to customize infinitely. From a Marketing perspective too there are several opportunities to optimize- Advertising targeted to Offline Sales also tend to 'halo' onto Online demand and likewise, Advertising targeted to Online sales drives Offline demand. So to make optimal use of total Marketing dollars, you need to remove focus from individual channels and optimize across channels. Optimization should be targeted to profits and not sales because margins tend to be significantly different for online vs. other channels. Optimization needs to be done using statistical regression models to avoid confounding lifts between correlated media tactics.