About Jim Sterne

Speaker, Author, Digital Visionary,
Practical Advisor

Jim Sterne has spent more than 35 years selling and marketing technical products. He began his career helping people understand Visicalc at a time when “personal computer” was an oxymoron. He sold business computers to companies that had never owned one in the 1980s, consulted and keynoted about online marketing in the 1990’s, and founded a conference and a professional association around digital analytics in the 2000’s. He is currently focused on the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to marketing.

Enter the Internet

Since 1994, Jim Sterne has devoted all of his attention to the Internet as a marketing medium. His insight and currency are assured by his experience as a founding partner of a regional Internet access provider and his activities as a consultant to some of the world’s largest companies and innovative start-ups.

On Monday, September 27, 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released the first public version of its graphical World Wide Web browser, Mosaic. On Tuesday, September 27, 1994, Jim Sterne launched the world’s first “Marketing on the Internet” seminar series. This eight-city tour introduced the United States to the possibilities of using the Internet for advertising, marketing, sales, and customer service.

In November, 1995, Jim Sterne’s book, World Wide Web Marketing (now in its third edition) was published by John Wiley & Sons. His second book, Customer Service on the Internet, was published in October, 1996 (second edition, 2000). Sterne’s third tome: What Makes People Click: Advertising on the Internet was released in September, 1997 and the fourth: E-Mail Marketing in 2000. Web Metrics, Proven methods for Measuring Web Site Success, was released in 2002, followed by Advanced Email Marketing, Social Media Metrics, and the tongue-in-cheek Devil’s Data Dictionary. His latest offering is Artificial Intelligence for Marketing: Practical Applications.

Sterne launched an event on digital analytics called the eMetrics Summit in 2002 which ran until 2017 with 86 Summits conducted worldwide. The audience then created the Digital Analytics Association where Sterne served as Board Chair for seventeen years. In 2018, the eMetrics Summit became the Marketing Analytics Summit.

Jim Sterne has presented his unique perspective on Internet marketing at conferences around the world, and has lectured at Stanford, Oxford and MIT. He stays active as a public speaker and as a consultant, helping each client set Internet marketing goals and determine customer relationship strategies.

Read the Thought Leader Profile for Jim Sterne
from Digital Strategy Consulting Ltd