MediaTel

By the year 2020, 50% of advertising expenditure will be online, according to Richard Eyre, chairman of the IAB, who was speaking at last night's Media Question Time, hosted by MediaTel Group.

"I think with the traditional media all going online - television, radio, newspapers, magazines at least - that the difference between their online products and their traditional product is blurring," he said.

Andrew Walmsley, founder of i-level added: "We will see an increasing prevalence of all sorts of digital devices emerging, which will be accessing the internet. My phone is an internet device, people are walking around with blackberrys and PDAs, they're all internet enabled devices, just as your television will be and just as your toaster and your fridge will be.

"That might sound a ridiculous thing to say," he continued. "But as more and more homes have got wi-fi in the house, it becomes a trivial cost to connect any device in the entire house to the internet and control it through a web browser. So why wouldn't you have a fridge that sends you an email that there's a power failure and it's starting to melt? Why wouldn't you have these devices? They will soon become pervasive. "

Walmsley also commented that brands online are becoming more sophisticated. "Clients of ours are making television programmes which they're placing on the internet for people to watch, people that we're working with are working with publishers to create entire areas of a site on the web that is devoted to the consumers of whatever that brand is," he said. "These are very much more sophisticated means of communication and brand building than simply sticking banner ads up."

Jim Hytner, group marketing director of Barclays and a formerly of ITV, was particularly positive about the medium of television. "TV is an incredibly powerful medium that advertisers and agencies, but particularly advertisers who don't take enough interest in media really, should look at the power of television, ignore the noise around it," he said.

"If you take the current situation, you have more commercial impacts than ever before, you have less revenue going into the marketplace, so television is incredibly good value. Television not only helps drive brand values and engage people but it helps sell products, so my belief, our belief, is it doesn't matter what the noise is surrounding badly run or well run television stations, you just have to have an instinctive belief, which I do, that television is the most powerful medium currently and will be for a very long time. If you're a sensible client you will pile money in there."

MediaTel Group: 020 7439 7575 www.mediatelgroup.co.uk