I should be happy, but I'm not. We are witnessing momentous growth in online ad expenditure. There are more and more brands embracing internet advertising. They've even started producing online creative that doesn't resemble my six-year-old niece's potato prints.
So with all this good news, why isn't a digital media man like me grinning like the proverbial cream-supping cat?
The answer is simple -- online's share of media consumption and its share of advertising spend don't tally. Not even close. For a medium that represents over 12% of consumers' media consumption, its 2.5% share of UK ad expenditure is an imbalance that requires significant and sustained efforts to address.
We really need to understand why online's share of ad expenditure fails to reflect its consumption levels.
A key barrier to online's growth lies within the current dynamics and mechanics of media planning and buying.
Some media planners still don't quite "get" online. Put quite simply, they're reticent to allocate significant budget to a medium that they'll struggle to talk knowledgably about to a client.
Five years ago, it was hard to comprehend online media unless you were a digital marketer or Bill Gates. It was, therefore, unsurprising to witness media planners betraying their inertia towards what was a bedazzling and ever-changing media landscape.
Thankfully, online is now moving away from a being a medium awash with the flotsam of jargon and tech-speak. We're finally talking in a language that planners and clients understand.
Yet, despite these advances, online remains a highly complex medium. With its basis in technology coupled with its rapid proliferation, the opportunities for advertising communications never sit still. A homepage banner space viewed by half-a-million individuals a week three years ago is now a video streaming commercial seen by 5m in a single day.
We can not expect planners to know online inside out and must, therefore, ensure digital expertise sits alongside traditional planners from the outset. Not only does this enable online to be a key consideration in terms of channel selection -- it also ensures that the online medium is used to its best advantage and in a way that complements the offline elements of the campaign.
We've employed this approach within our group and the significant growth in our online adspend is testament to this collaborative approach.
There is also a fundamental need to address another factor that is arresting the usage of online by media planners.
As we all know, aside from the qualitative elements, planners need to be able to justify their media selection on the basis of audience data relating to estimated reach and frequency.
Agonisingly, for a medium based around a spine of technology and data, online still fails to deliver a common audience currency. As a consequence, planners are justifiably frustrated at the inability to cite audience reach and frequency figures alongside those referenced for traditional media.
A single audience measurement panel and the ability to predict reach and frequency for online is, quite simply, long overdue.
On a positive footnote -- the Internet Advertising Bureau and others should be commended for their initiatives aimed at providing robust empirical and qualitative research on the effectiveness of online advertising and its role in the media mix.
We need to sustain this momentum to ensure that online finally achieves a share of investment commensurate with its scale and worthy of the unique opportunities its interactivity provides advertisers.
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