The mistrust built up by ad men trying to brainwash us into thinking that naff products will change our lives has tarnished even the advertisements of those that actually can.

“Advertising is dead, long live social media” seems to be my current mantra and it’s not making me many new friends (well not in advertising at least).

Don’t blame me, I’m just the messenger. Consumers migrating from traditional broadcast media to online is the root cause of the problem, but perhaps I could deliver the message with less schadenfreude.

Of course advertising is migrating online too. The problem is that for every ten pounds lost in offline ad sales only one is gained in online banner sales.

Great news for brands wanting their ad spend to go further, if indeed straight advertising works online. Bad news for traditional media owners, even if they have managed to migrate their publication to the web.

The bulk of online advertising spend currently goes into Google’s pockets, paid-search being the ultimate in highly targeted no-waste advertising, but offering little for those wanting to build brands, the traditional role of advertising.

Man’s new best friend, the iPhone, could present salvation for advertising. Its impending new software release, with its ad friendly features, could breathe new life into online advertising, given the trend to surf while on the move.

Strangely enough it is social media that presents the best opportunity for the future of advertising, despite consumers using social networking to gang up on errant corporations and ridicule their marketing messages.

For the right brands, the highly targeted world of Facebook is one of the better places to advertise, but only in support of more subtle social media marketing activity.

The message on Facebook banners needs to change from “click here to buy this” to  “become our friend” and by implication benefit from a two-way relationship.

In this social media world of openness and sharing, the less we look like we are trying to sell stuff the better!

We need a new breed of ad men, who are acutely aware that advertising in the social media space can start conversations about their brands but not control consumers conclusions.

Ironically, if the web has scuppered the adverting industry, by morphing into a social media platform, it might actually get advertising afloat again.

Online marketers have a habit of attributing a sale to the ‘last click’ a punter made before visiting their websites. But the purchasing journey is far more complex than that as I’m about to illustrate.

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It’s true that prior to buying something online, most of us have usually visited a search engine. But was that where we made the decision to purchase?

Online marketers have a habit of attributing a sale to the ‘last click’ a punter made before visiting their websites. But the purchasing journey is far more complex than that as I’m about to illustrate.

For some reason, I always drink Guinness at rugby matches. Prior to match day I may be exposed to a few Guinness ads on TV. Apart from the latest one, Guinness ads are pretty memorable. On match day, I’ll walk past a Guinness billboard (or 48 sheet as my colleagues in offline advertising call them).

I notice fellow rugby fans are wearing Guinness hats as I push past them on the way to the bar.  It’s funny how drinking before midday in a silly hat is socially acceptable but only if the bar looks over a field of grass!

As I hold my tenner in front of me to indicate my desire to be served and that I have the means to make a purchase, I notice the Guinness beer mats strung across the bar.

I scan the draft taps and notice the Guinness sign standing out amongst the vast selection of draft beverages. I order, you guessed it, a pint of Guinness!

Now I’ve got a drink, let me get to my point before its time for another one.

At this point, an online marketer would get out his traffic report and prove that the ‘point of sales advertising’ (or ‘beer mats and towels’ as you and I would call it) generated the most sales!

The fact that I pretty much woke up fancying a Guinness because I subconsciously associate it with rugby (thanks to billions of pound worth of sponsorship) had nothing to do with it!

In case you hadn’t spotted it, the bar is the search engine in this increasingly tenuous analogy. I didn’t just walk up to it, give the barmaid the keywords ‘cold’, ‘beer’ and ‘alcohol’ and made my selection from a list ordered by relevance.

When considering where we are getting the best from all of our online activity, we must consider the bigger picture. Banner advertising has suffered from having its success measured with a ‘last click’ mentality.

A typical punter can be exposed to banner ads many times on different websites before finally clicking on one. They may never do so, but might remember some of your brand messages next time they see your name in their search results.

We need to analyse the full engagement history of customers across all online activity to find out what is working best. It is often hard to find the right technology to correlate this data as media owners all have their own diverse reporting systems.

But if you managed to pull it off, you will find that paid search advertising in isolation is not always the best marketing investment.

According to the IAB, UK online advertising spend grew 41.3% in the first half of 2007 to give it a 15% share of the £9.1 billion spent so far this year trying to make people buy stuff.

Forgive me for not falling of my chair.

The only thing I find staggering about this non-revelation is that brands seem to be wasting 85.3% of their advertising budgets somewhere else!

OK, making a living from herding pixels might make me slightly biased, but measuring which part of their ad spend is actually being wasted gives marketing directors the biggest headache.

However, if they spend their money on search advertising, they will actually know which text ads lead to purchases on their e-commerce website, and it doesn’t get much more measurable than that.

That’s why more than half of the online ad spend went on paid-for search, leading to one in every two online purchases originating from a search engine results page.

But even if you’re not selling online, tools for measuring the effectiveness of banner advertising, used for engagement and brand-building, have become more sophisticated, making online more accountable, transparent and measurable than traditional advertising sectors.

The IAB also reports that the biggest increase in online ad spend was in classified advertising, now accounting for 10% of online budgets. Well lets face it, when was the last time you picked up the actual Yellow Pages to look for a tradesman or local service?

Recruitment, automotive and surprisingly the property sector being the biggest budget movers, giving us hope that one day we may live in an estate agent free world.

Internet display advertising (including banners, skyscrapers and rich media formats) climbed 33% to £287 million, as brand marketers in all sectors targeted consumers with increasingly creative rich media and video advertisements.

In many cases, TV advertising budgets are being diverted to online channels for distributing video ads.

But are there any real revelations here?

52% of us Brits are now online at home and 90% of us on broadband. We are spending 180% more of our leisure time surfing and women and people over 50 are now a major online audience.

That covers my girlfriend and mother, whose combined spending, I have recently discovered, compares well to the GDP of Tonga, making the internet now an even more attractive medium to an ever broader set of advertisers and brands.

The pinup boy of new media has recently become the laughing stock, of old media at least, for saying something stupid.

Last month, while launching Facebook’s new advertising platform ‘Beacon’, he declared that “”once every hundred years, media changes”" to a rather sceptical audience.

Now referred to as ‘Zuckerberg’s Law’, his formula has come back to haunt him.

He was referring to the birth of ‘Social Advertising’ and suggesting the dominant media of the future, well for the next 100 years at any rate, would be social networking sites – like his own.

But is Zuckerberg a visionary and does his law stand up to history?

Nick Carr at www.roughtype.com thinks Zuckerberg may be right.

He points out that every century, like clockwork, there has been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signalling, which also lasted a hundred years. And of course there was the hundred years of yodelling, and then came the printing press, which was invented almost precisely 100 years ago. And so forth and so on up to the present day, the day that Facebook picked up the 100-year torch and ran with it.

But perhaps he is taking Zuckerberg too literally.

We are indeed on the cusp a big change media consumption, as the ‘born digital’ generation, who don’t read newspapers, don’t watch TV and don’t listen to the radio, become the largest consumer group.

Zuckerberg’s sentiment may well be proven right, if not his timings.

Ever since the launch of Beacon, Zuckerberg has been under fire from all directions, including his valued Facebook users. Many petitioned that the Beacon system was invading their privacy and threatened to vote with their virtual feet.

When users shop online, Beacon tells friends and businesses what they looked at or bought. The problem is, sometimes you really don’t want your friends to know what you’ve been buying – a nasal hair remover for instance.

Beacon is particularly attractive to advertisers as adverts are presented as personal recommendations from people on your friends list. They effectively endorse products by purchasing items.

Last week Zuckerberg bowed to pressure from his users and changed Facebook so they can switch off Beacon if they choose. He apologised and said: “”We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them.”"

Zuckerberg may be losing friends in the West, but he clearly is making new ones in the East.  Billionaire Li Ka-shing has reportedly parted with $60m for a 0.4% personal share of Facebook.

There has been much speculation that Facebook would buy a Chinese home grown Social Network site to give them access to the largest internet market outside the US.

But it seems Zuckerberg’s time would be best spent repairing friendships at home.

In my world the word targeting’ has an unpleasant overtone.

In my experience, being targeted, in most contexts, seldom has a positive outcome for individuals subjected to it, especially if they happened to be a deer.

But if you’re trying to sell something, targeting is a good word as it allows you to optimise the return on your advertising investment.

Most of us are reluctant to give out too much personal information for fear we’ll be hounded by companies who have decided that we fit the bill for their products.

Inconveniently for them, and luckily for us, the law gets in the way, and our consent is needed for anyone to share our personal details.

However there is no such restriction on recording which websites we have visited.

If I’ve been surfing car manufacturers’ websites all day, it’s likely that I’m in the market for a new car. Therefore the next time I go to my favourite social networking site would be a good time to show me a car insurance ad.

The ad serving networks that control which banners are shown, when and on which sites, can now do so based on our recent surfing history.

So called behavioural targeting allows ads to be chosen on a visitor-by-visitor basis. We could be looking at the same site at the same time, but while I’d get shown travel ads, my girlfriend would be seeing handbag offers.

Previously, Internet users were more task-oriented. Now people stay online longer and do more things, extending purchase cycles to days rather than minutes, so good old fashioned contextual targeting, where you advertise on sites that have content relevant to your product, doesn’t work anymore.

Many people become alarmed when they discover they are being behaviourally targeted. For some reason, men are keener to keep their surfing history private than women!

But before you get too scared, let me reassure you that this is not some Orwellian nightmare, where Big Bother is replaced with Advertising Man.

Yes, they are watching what you look at online, but they don’t know who you are. In fact it’s probably better that they collect data on our online movements than on us.

There is in fact an argument that consumers benefit from more targeted advertisements. According to some reports, behaviourally targeted banners get almost three times more click-through than contextually targeted ones.

If people are clicking on ads then clearly they are not annoying distractions but valued content.

You might have started to noticed that many website carry ads that seem spookily similar to what you’re just been thinking about, well now you know why.

And if you’ve started to suspect that some ads are actually following you around the web, don’t worry you’re not going mad – they are!

A MMOG is not some kind of feline monster, with an appetite for human flesh, although many people can loose vast parts of their lives to them.

No, MMOG stands for ‘massively multi-user online game’ and they are growing in popularity faster even than Facebook!

Running around in a fictitious world pretending to be something you’re not can be very liberating. Escapism, thanks to the internet, no longer requires any imagination, just a PC or a games console.

Wikipedia defines a MMOG as a game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. By necessity, they’re played on the internet and feature at least one persistent fantasy world.

MMOGs enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a grand scale, and sometimes allow them to interact meaningfully with people around the world. Although Wikipedia is pretty light on how it defines ‘meaningfully’.

There are MMOGs for just about every conceivable genre. If you want be an elf, EverQuest is possibly for you. Fancy being an Orc? Try World Of WarCraft.

If you just fancy being rich, beautiful, young and promiscuous, Second Life is definitely for you.

According to ‘MMOG World’, a fictional publication I just invented, the number of people regularly playing MMOGs increased by 79% in the last 12 months. Compare that to the mere 46% increase in social networking over the same time frame and you’ll see MMOGs are becoming big business.

Many put their popularity down to an increasing number of people dissatisfied with their real lives, in our increasingly competitive, consumerist, modern world. Dissatisfaction bought on by advertisers constantly showing them what they are missing.

But where the audience goes, the ad man will follow.

Although most MMOGs are funded by subscription, the opportunity to sell advertising space within these virtual worlds has not been missed.

We have had in-game advertising for years. Sports games, such as car racing and football, gain realism from having real word brands advertise on billboards dotted around the tracks and stadiums.

However, inserting ads into MMOGS, can often ruin their immersive experience – after all wizards don’t wear Adidas T-shirts and have no need for hair restoring products.

One solution is to award points to gamers who watch ads, or make the MMOGs free, yet sell interstitial space for video ads between game levels.

The question is, will brands want to advertise to this audience?

Well, according to MMOG World, improvement in technology and interface design means MMOGS are no longer the sole preserve of computer nerds -players now come from all demographics and walks of life.

Think of the targeting opportunities and how easy it must be to sell something to someone when you know what their fantasies are.