THEY lurk in the back of the mind — unwanted for decades, impossible to lose, like an irritating hook from an old pop song.

Who can forget the Milky Bar kid, Renault’s “Papa? Nicole?”, the “Hello Boys” Wonderbra campaign featuring Eva Herzigova’s cleavage or the Martians bringing gifts of prefabricated mashed potato? However, the emergence of new technology has caused the advertising landscape to change, and advertising as we have known it for decades is set to mutate accordingly.

Advertisers are increasingly reluctant to spend their budgets on a single television or print advertising campaign, knowing that they will not command the same audiences as they once did.

Television is split into a bewildering array of channels. The emergence of personal video recorders (PVRs) such as Sky Plus means that we can now fast-forward through the commercial breaks, an idea that — understandably — terrifies the industry.

The fragmentation of television has spelt the end of mass audiences — and not just those oft-repeated Morecambe and Wise Christmas specials, grandstanding episodes of Coronation Street and the FA Cup Final. In 1999, 150 commercial and 27 non-commercial television programmes were watched by 15 million or more people, according to the Broadcasters Audience Research Board. By 2004, just three commercial and three non-commercial programmes were watched by similar numbers.

Against this background, the increase in internet penetration over the past five years has prompted advertisers to move away from traditional advertising channels and look online. Television and newspapers still dominate British advertising expenditure, with television having a 29.6 per cent slice of the market and newspapers a 37.3 per cent stake, but internet advertising is growing fast, albeit from a low base. Last year the internet market grew 41.3 per cent, while newspapers were down 0.3 per cent. Television was up 1.5 per cent and radio was down 4.1 per cent, according to ZenithOptimedia.

Advertisers are aware that they need to embrace new technology and understand the changing needs of consumers, in order to get messages across in the most effective way.

Dominic Proctor, chief executive of MindShare Worldwide, said: “To start with, it is important to first tap into the needs of the today’s consumer. The advertising we have known in the past couple of decades has been about interruption. Adverts in the future need to be more about engagement.

“Even internet advertising is still in the irritating phase of interruption. Some internet pop-up adverts [programs that pop out on to the screen unbidden when you open a page] have a negative effect and will probably be phased out. Search advertising, where Google has made its money, is very successful.”

It will become increasingly important for advertisers to understand the distribution channels available, he said. The internet will, he argues, become more audiovisual, mobile phones will become more advanced and people will be able to download their favourite programmes on to their iPods. He predicts that the internet could become the dominant force in advertising in ten years’ time.

“As long as advertising remains engaging — whether it’s through sponsorship, search, or if people can be encouraged to download an advert — new technology will be an effective advertising vehicle,” he said.

Greg Grimmer, managing director of Zed Media, one of the largest buyers of online advertising in Britain, thinks that the key to successful advertising in new media is creative ideas and tailoring content to suit an individual. He cites an example: if Sony joins forces with a music downloading service, the electronics group could tailor an advert to suit the person who downloads that kind of music.

Mr Grimmer says: “The kind of person who downloads a James Blunt track might be more interested in an LCD television than a games console. An advert could pop up catering to that person’s needs when they download the track.” He thinks that advertising on a mobile phone could also be successful, if not done in an interrupting or intrusive manner. “The next generation of mobile phones could lead to a number of advertising possibilities. To begin with, people will be able to effortlessly download film trailers,” he said.

The trick is to provide advertising that consumers want, rather than throwing it at them in a scatter-gun fashion.

One distribution channel likely to become popular to advertisers in the future is video-on-demand. According to Informa Media, next year 32 per cent of households will have video-on-demand, compared to 5 per cent in 2000.

Christine Mitchell, executive director of television services at the video-on-demand service Video Networks, is working with media buying agencies to sell video-on-demand as an advertising medium. She said that the company, which has 34,000 subscribers, is working with an agency to trial the possibilities of video-on-demand.

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