TECHNOLOGY is swiftly making traditional television advertising campaigns redundant. Modern viewers can use personal video recorders to skip past ads and they can buy commercial-free programmes to play on their iPods.

Meanwhile, there are now so many television channels available to the average viewer that to spend millions on an advertising campaign that reaches only a small handful seems wasteful.

Robin Wight, chairman of WCRS, the advertising agency behind commercials for Mini and the 118-118 telephone directory, said: “The cost of TV per consumer has gone up because the number of viewers has fallen. At the same time, there are a whole range of ways in which it is possible to reach consumers.”

The internet, on the other hand, allows advertisers to target consumers more accurately and track their responses. It has become so popular among British advertisers that the value of website advertising rose to £490.8 million in the first six months of this year, up 62 per cent on the same period last year and more than the £407.8 million spent in the whole of 2003.

For the first time, the money spent on web advertising in Britain was more than that spent on outdoor advertising and more than the money spent on radio and cinema advertising combined.

The Internet Advertising Bureau predicts that online advertising will be worth more than £1 billion by the end of the year. John Hegarty, chairman of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the advertising agency that recently won the British Airways account, said that although consumers were watching more television, the market was becoming far more fragmented.

He said: “It’s still an incredibly powerful medium and you walk away from it at your peril, but conventional use of TV by advertisers is on the way out.”

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