The substantial online budget is to be spent with online partners such as MSN, Freeserve and other major portals for which it provides competitions as free content and on which it also places ads.
Nick Thain, IPT's online marketing manager, said: "We are very flexible and happy to use whatever form of advertising our partners are comfortable with. Our main objective is to deliver registrations to MyOffers.co.uk, where we collect permission-based marketing data."
IPT owns online brands such as , which provides the majority of the prizes for MSN's competition page. It also owns 7m opt-in email addresses through its OK Mail service.
"We regularly provide partners with tailored creatives and copy to help them get the most out of our prizes. We will also use our budget to enable our partners to send emails to their databases. We will undertake the set-up of the email campaign, provide creatives and track responses all for free," Thain said.
IPT recently reported record results for the year ended December 31 2002, with turnover almost doubling to 拢5.3m from 拢2.7m. Pre-tax profits rose to 拢565,980 against a loss of 拢643,724 in 2001.
IPT has grown to become one of the UK's largest online permission-based data collection and data sales firms in the UK. It offers multichannel prospect data (email, postal and SMS), with ownership of 3m opt-ins, selectable by 500 interest categories, and brokerage rights to 7m more opt-in email addresses.
IPT's blue-chip client base includes Bass, BCA, British Airways, Centrica, Egg, Freeserve, Gateway, Glaxo, Homebase, Ladbroke, Lloyds TSB, Oxfam, Tesco, RBS, Reckitt Benckiser and VirginNet.
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