MediaTel

Our weekly columnist Raymond Snoddy on the latest IAB figures putting online adspend ahead of TV for the first time.

Trebles all round today at the Internet Advertising Bureau as internet advertising celebrates the fact that it passed television advertising for the first time in the first half of this year.

Fair enough. Triumphalism is the stock in trade of industry groups when they can dress up plausible figures and there are easy headlines to be won.

Undoubtedly the numbers are good with UK internet ad spend  up 4.6% to £1.75 billion against the background of an advertising sector down 16.6%. At the same time television advertising fell by around 17% to £1.6 billion.

It is certainly a symbolic moment. Television has been beaten into second place after nearly fifty years by a medium that could scarcely be glimpsed on the horizon a decade ago. In 1998, when the IAB first started collecting numbers, online ad spend totalled a mere £19.4 million.

And the UK is the only major economy so far where this has happened - a testimony perhaps to the sophistication of the UK industry.

While recognising the achievement, it is time to issue a few cautionary words. The online industry is in danger of getting carried away with itself and in the process risks pissing a lot of people off, including natural allies. Certainly some of the fringe elements are starting to get carried away.

"For so long the protagonist on the global advertising stage, TV is rapidly becoming the bit part," was the thoughtful contribution today from Martin McNulty, a director of the online marketing agency Trafficbroker.

That's presumably why online search and comparison sites scramble over each other to advertise on network television. Presumably they must all believe in the effectiveness of television advertising.

Others can scarcely wait to celebrate the death of newspapers without a thought about how their social role can be replicated if such a thing were ever to happen.

It can be entertaining to watch rival trade bodies trying to scratch each others' eyes out with rival statistics, surveys and research. Sometimes they appear as bad as each other at the "my media is better than your media" game.

But surely Thinkbox, the television marketing agency, has a point when it argues that the IAB is not comparing like with like here, and in effect creating a misleading impression.

There is no dispute about the overall numbers, which are vouched for by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The question is what constitutes online advertising, what is thrown in and does it include the kitchen sink?

The £1.75 billion figure includes e-mail, search, classified,  display and, for goodness sake, online television advertising, which many expect to grow rapidly in future.

Should TV be included in the online column in future or the TV column? After all, the online TV advertising opportunity has been created by the expensively produced programmes of the television industry funded by television advertising.

No less than 60% of the IAB total is accounted for by search - in effect a powerful new communications industry. It is irrefutably online but should it be classified as a spectacular adjunct of direct mail, instead of being lumped in with all other aspects of internet communication to get to the current huge total?

Interestingly, one element of internet advertising actually declined in the first six months of 2009 - online display advertising such as website banners. Maybe that's because it is not a very effective medium.

In fact, according to Thinkbox, if you pull together all the marketing outputs of the greater television industry including, spot, interactive, on-demand and sponsorship, last year's TV total was £3.7 billion, still ahead of the internet - just.

Do any of these arguments about classification matter much? Probably not, except that perceptions, whether true or false, can be self-fulfilling. Newspapers are dying, TV advertising is a bit player and then the careless fashionable money drifts towards "the winner".

The 'online overtakes TV' headline is quite useful in a different way for internet advertising. It obscures the fact that the explosive rate of growth of online advertising is slowing and is being affected by the recession.

The IAB believes that online can take its share of the total advertising cake from the current 23.5% up to 30%. It may happen but it is just as likely that it will fall short as online matures and runs out of steam. It would also be a good idea if the online industry matured too and stopped being quite so triumphalist.

Digital and online are, after all, now an integral part of all media and it's time for the online folks to stop behaving like some bolshy new kids on the block.

Do you agree with Raymond? Send us your opinion - news@mediatel.co.uk