Last night at exactly ten-past-eight, nineteen people jumped out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft in the middle of a dinner party.

Viewers of Channel4’s Come Dine with Me reality programme were treated to a live commercial break where skydivers spelt out the letters H-O-N-D-A as they plummeted to earth.

As they only had 3 minutes and 20 seconds of ‘air-time’ to pull it off, the participants must have been relieved it wasn’t Volkswagen who had commissioned advert.

In fact, the ad had no Honda branding on it at all and had the skydivers messed up, you’d have been none the wiser as to who was behind it.

In this on-demand age, have Channel4 and Honda shown the advertising world the way forward with this impressive stunt?

“,”

In this new world of fast-forward, television advertising has never been easier to avoid. But you can rely on Honda to come up with a campaign so entertaining that it will probably have people rewinding to see it again.

Last night at exactly ten-past-eight, nineteen people jumped out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft in the middle of a dinner party.

Viewers of Channel4’s Come Dine with Me reality programme were treated to a live commercial break where skydivers spelt out the letters H-O-N-D-A as they plummeted to earth.

As they only had 3 minutes and 20 seconds of ‘air-time’ to pull it off, the participants must have been relieved it wasn’t Volkswagen who had commissioned advert.

In fact, the ad had no Honda branding on it at all and had the skydivers messed up, you’d have been none the wiser as to who was behind it.

In this on-demand age, have Channel4 and Honda shown the advertising world the way forward with this impressive stunt?

When it comes to live events TV is still the best media. Channel4’s in-house team, who came up with the idea, cleverly used this to turn this commercial message into an event.

A revival of ‘live’ adverts, once a common feature of fifties soap operas, was regarded as a weapon in the battle against viewer resistance to the hard sell.

But it is now being used as a weapon to keep viewers away from their remote controls and re-excite advertisers about broadcast media.

British advertisers are expected to spend around £3.6 billion on the internet this year, outstripping the £3.4 billion that is forecast to be spent on television advertising.

This trend could be reversed if these commercially sponsored live events take off. However it is the combination of both on and offline activity that has given Honda so much exposure from this event.

The event was well advertised both on and offline. Over two million viewers watched it live - an increase of over 200,000 on top of the Come Dine with Me audience.

So that’s 200,000 people like me who made a point of tuning in.

The subsequent views on YouTube will have no doubt surpassed that by the end of the weekend.

There’s plenty of behind-the-scenes footage to be found online too. With so much mileage to be gained from online branded video content these days, Honda would be foolish not to freely distribute it.

And of course, the PR from the live event has laid the foundation for Honda’s forthcoming traditional campaign, which will also involve sky diving stunts and underline the strap line ‘difficult is worth doing’.

With this TV first, Honda has cleverly made its forthcoming ads must-see productions too – I can’t wait.

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.

Sunday saw the dawn of my 44th year on this planet and the fact I enjoyed the day on my newly acquired allotment confirmed to me that I was indeed loosing touch.

Naturally, I turned to the internet for help, as most people with embarrassing medical problems do.

Luckily I found the excellent website of the Midlife Crisis Retreat (www.midlife-crisis-retreat.co.uk), sponsored by Volkswagen.

The website tells us that since Nigel Havers opened the centre in 1973, their aim has been simple: to cure men from an affliction commonly known as The Midlife Crisis.

Once they are cured they can get on with their lives, and most importantly start to appreciate the finely engineered Volkswagen Passat.

For those not familiar with the VW Passat, all you need to know is that it was voted ‘Towcar of the Year 2007’ by people who go caravanning.

On the website, you can take an anonymous test to see if you have the condition.

Questions include “Have you started using words like, Safe, Wicked, Dude or Awesome in the last few months?”.

Better still, if any of your similarly aged friends have recently taken up kite boarding or entered a triathlon despite a life dedicated to lethargy, you can send them a personalised video invite to the retreat.

You give the site their name and email address along with the type of activity they have recently been up to and a Nigel Havers look-alike contacts them to give them a good talking too!

This classic combination of online viral and word-of-month marketing showcases the internet at its best. The fact I’m blogging about it now is indicative of how seeding a website URL in the blogopshere can get your marketing message to an audience of thousands in a few days – thousands of men over 40 in this case!

The tiny VW logo on the website and scarce mention of the product lends authenticity to the spoof website.

Even better, there is no need for the site to list the merits of the Passat. The objective here is not to directly sell cars, but to gain a valuable mailing list of men whose friends think they might be having a midlife crisis.

Gaining personal information from an online audience, increasingly cynical about handing over these details to corporations, is difficult.

But this site avoids that by getting peoples friends to volunteer their personal information for them!

Meanwhile this website has endeared me to the VW brand and definitely helped me at my time of crisis, or at least in determining if I’m having one.

I may have an allotment, but don’t own a Passat yet dudes, so 44 is still just a number to me.

I remember when everyone used to say there was more entertainment in the ad breaks than during the programmes. Well maybe those times are coming back.

The latest Cadbury film featuring a gorilla playing the drums to a Phil Collins sound track has got everybody talking (and laughing). (Not yet seen it? Click here.)

No voice-over telling you it’s made with a pint and a half of milk, no sexy woman lying on a chaise longue biting into a smooth bar of chocolate. Just pure, unadulterated fun.

Why?

Why not? It’s said it shows that moment just after you’ve had a piece of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate. That’s good enough for me.

There has of course always been humour in advertising, starting with Smash in the seventies. The reason we don’t see as much fun as we should is that agencies and clients run scared when they have a ‘silly’ idea put to them.

Both the agency and the client have stuck their neck out on this one and it’s worked, getting 500,000 visits in one week on YouTube and its own Facebook group.

What tends to happen in the ad world is that a successful piece of advertising starts a trend where other agencies use the success of someone else’s ad to sell their own brand of humour. The problem is convincing the client to be as brave, but unfortunately it seldom works and we’re back to chaise longues.

TV is so bad at the moment that the advertising commercial has little to compete with. So come on everybody, more gorillas and Martians in our three-minute gaps between the X-Factor and all that other crap.

I’d expected that sharing one mobile cell with 180,000 people would make getting a connection pretty hit and miss, but Orange at least never let me down once.

One cider-soaked Glasto veteran explained to me that in the good old days, if you wanted to spend any festival time with people you actually knew, you had to make detailed rendezvous plans with emergency meeting points clearly defined.

If plans changed, you could leave messages scribbled on bits of paper pinned to the meeting point posts. Now, no one makes plans or knows how to stick to them, as everything can be dynamically coordinated by SMS.

Of course, getting Glasto tickets this year was strictly an electronic affair too.

Only the 400,000 people who pre-registered online were allowed to buy the 177,500 tickets available to the public. Those lucky enough to get on the website snapped up all the tickets in just one hour and 45 minutes.

The registration process involved submitting a photograph of yourself which was printed on your ticket to prevent touting.

But while the lucky ones ended up with mud on their faces, the festival organisers got egg on theirs, as the database of unsuccessful registrants somehow got into the hands of spammers who sent unsolicited emails for other festivals.

The web has not only revolutionised the way punters get tickets for the festival but the way many of the artists end up there too. Headline act Arctic Monkeys, having allegedly been discovered on MySpace, found themselves walking out onto the hallowed Pyramid Stage without ever having to serve their time on lesser stages.

The Internet’s profound effect on the music industry was something Pete Townshend pointed out during The Who’s Sunday-night finale, being the oldest pre-Internet band on offer this year.

Although, you would have thought someone might have told him “”best not mention the Internet, Pete…”"

The theme this year at Glasto was on climate change. Festival-goers were asked to sign up to the “”I Count”" climate change campaign, which encourages people to think about reducing their carbon footprint.

But to be honest, it was hard to think about parched Third-World countries and anything other than your mud footprint when you were stood in an English monsoon. The vast piles of discarded rubbish and the carbon monoxide cloud over the world’s biggest traffic jam did little to convince me of the festival’s planet-friendly credentials.

Orange did their bit by launching a wind-powered mobile phone charger at the festival. Stick it on your tent pole in the morning and by the evening it would accumulate enough power to recharge the phone of the person who nicked it during the day.

It’s an innovative device, as nowadays mobile phones are just as important as wellies for festival survival. Although I can’t help but feel they have somehow diminished Glastonbury’s character-building effect for our children.

But I too now feel the need to make my own list, which I’m grandly calling the Eight Golden Rules of Online Marketing, as I have become weary of seeing them broken.

The reason there are only eight, is mostly because I couldn’t think of anymore, or none at least of a great enough magnitude. Although eight is of course a round number in a binary world.

Rule 1: The Internet is not television.  In fact even television is not television anymore with the new breed of digital on-demand services, but the addition of a red button, can’t come close to the control the on-line audience has over what it consumes. TV viewers are still, largely, a captive passive audience, web users are not.

Rule 2:  Self-indulgence won’t be tolerated.  Cut to the chase fast when delivery your proposition. Unless you are actually called Norman Foster or Saatchi, leave pretentious stuff out, or confine it to the ‘About Us’ page.  And for those that still think quirky logo animation and long winded splash introductory pages are still cool please see rule 1.

Rule 3: Trust is essential and easily lost. To transact with someone you’ve never met, potentially in another country, takes a lot of faith. Brands need to build faith with every interaction, being open and transparent about what is going to happen to a user before every click.

Rule 4: Don’t get in the way of content.  Content is king and the sites with the best content attract the most traffic, which makes them worth advertising on. Don’t bugger this up. Any form of interruptive advertising such as pop-ups, overlays, or interstitial ads will damage your brand. See rule 1.

Rule 5: Not everyone is using IE6 on a PC.  Your online experience is determined by the kit you’re using to surf. Assume a lowest common denominator approach when choosing sexy technology platforms to deliver brand messages.  A good percentage of the world is now free from Microsoft and your brand will look stupid if you’ve not realised this.

Rule 6: Don’t trick anyone into visiting your website. Always give people what they were expecting. Banners that carry fake buttons to gain click-throughs by mistake or AdWord ads that bear no relation to the search term serve only to break rule 3.

Rule 7: Usability is the brand experience. If your site annoys or frustrates its visitors they will tell their friend or blog about how useless your site is. Good usability is a good brand experience.

Rule 8: Offline marketing rules apply too. People have been selling stuff to other people for years; even before the internet! Many of their offline brand marketing theories are still valid, even in a digital world.