BBC Click Online did a piece about online advertising and thankfully didn't mess it up by leaving out search engine marketing altogether, in fact it actually gets some credit for once.

Tim Phillips: "It's the dirty secret of online advertising. This is the stuff that really works, and the reason it works is because if you search for something on Yahoo! or Google then you actively want it, and these are the people you want to be putting your advertising in front of.

Unfortunately, writing a cheque to a search engine isn't terribly creative; this is not why advertising agencies have creative departments. So it doesn't really get talked about a great deal, but it really works and you can measure it works as well."

We agree completely there Tim apart from the dirty secret part. I'd tend to switch that around and say the real dirty secret of online advertising is that most of the creative led stuff doesn't work and never worked, so why have agencies continued to push it?

View the piece here:
http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickonline.asp?pageid=665&co_pageid=3