First up, let’s set some context about where I’m coming from. Online advertising is just one small part of this massive cultural change we’re all living through.

The internet cuts through barriers; tears down walls. It's the most liberating and educational tool mankind could have ever wished for. And at its heart is a new treatment of knowledge: a liberalisation and democratisation of knowledge in ways we dared not hope for twenty years ago.

Media, telecommunications and IT collide together in this explosion of convergence we’re seeing today. Media gets jumbled up as the web appears on our mobile phones, TV on our laptops and newspapers in our email.

Retail has broadened to embrace the web as a key sales channel, entertainment media have done the same, and now the Web 2.0 era unlocks the voices of citizens to take part in communities, contributing to collective knowledge and working ever smarter.

However you look at it, this is big stuff. And if it’s a difficult pattern to read that’s because it’s happening all around us right now. A bunch of new blogs launch every second, giving anyone the tools to write and link... and through the network, the potential to be heard.

Publishing has changed, media has changed, and with that marketing needs to change.

You argue that during the last five years large ad budgets have been wasted inefficiently in Switzerland. Can you explain that?

There a gap; between where audiences place their time, and where marketers are placing their ad budgets. In truth there’s a gap like this in every market, but here in Switzerland it’s that much greater. The waste isn’t a criticism of traditional media planning, it’s simply a by-product of the fact that there’s another mainstream media on the scene and that while audiences are being crowded out by messages in the traditional challenges, many brands are silent online. Some even believe that their website is enough of a footprint to guarantee an effective online presence.

Switzerland’s high use of technology, massive penetration of broadband, growing use of wifi and growing switch to ecommerce means that there’s a strong ‘at-home’ audience as well as a massive ‘at-work’ audience. But this just doesn’t tally up with where marketers place their ad budgets. While online adspend in the UK is closing on the milestone of 15% of total advertising, Switzerland’s seems to be a tenth of this; that’s only just above the market share in Mexico.

You wonder why merely 1.5% of ad spends go to online. Have you found an answer yet?

Like any new innovation, it takes a while for industries to embrace new communication channels. This was true in the early days of television, radio, and even press. It’s just more pronounced with online because the changes in the cultural and technical landscape have taken place in an incredibly short timeframe, and most firms are having to catch up. In Switzerland the situation is that much more pronounced.

Do you view Switzerland -- as far as online-advertisment is concerned -- as a developing country? And yourself as a development worker?

In the last year I’ve taught online marketing in more than 15 countries and the paradox I regularly see is that even in markets where the total amount of spend is small, the thinking can be as sharp and savvy as anywhere. If you’re plugged into the new networked world, you can be enjoying the same RSS feeds and blogs as the most cutting edge players in London or New York. The web blows geography to bits.

That means that even if the average position for a national economy is to appear behind, it’s hiding the fact that some smart marketers will have figured this all out and already made the switch. Chances are they keep pretty quiet about it, because the longer this stays below the radar of their competitors, the better it is for the entrepreneurial firm.

When I helped set up the IAB in the UK, I remember exactly the same pattern: on average 1 or 2% of advertising spend went into the medium, but that ‘average’ hid that fact that for the vast majority of firms the investment was next to nothing, while for a handful it was north of 10% or 15%. Hence an ‘average’ of just 1 or 2% and many marketing directors lulled into a false sense of security about the competitive landscape.

Remember, every month you’re not talking with your customers online, someone else is.

In your opinion 8% of all ad spends in Switzerland should go to online advertising. How did you come up with that figure?

Technically advanced, high disposable income, good broadband penetration, long experience of office and home computing, the web playing a key role in purchase research… Of the more than factors that influence online adspend levels, pretty much everything is either highly positive, slightly positive or neutral. The only gaps seem to be in the online media industry’s marketing clout against its traditional cousins.

Away from the UK and Scandinavian markets (where you’d expect the share of online spend to be high), Switzerland is still has less than a third of the market shares in online that Spain or Italy have.

Solely because other countries spend more money on online advertising -- it must not necessarily be right for Switzerland. Can consumer behaviour in different countries just be equated?

Correct. No two countries can be directly compared, and just as we’re all different as individuals, so too are nations. But that doesn’t mean that there are not patterns, and these general patterns can reveal the disparities that force you to ask questions.

A few years back I was snowboarding in Davos: flights and accommodation all booked online, the resort researched through a dozen tourist sites, search engine links clicked, web cams of the slopes viewed, even the rest of the transport and a trip to see friends in Geneva was all figured out online. That’s several thousand euros of spend that couldn’t have been influenced by any classic media. Sure, my behaviour might not be typical, but if you were about to buy a new car or an expensive holiday abroad, wouldn’t you be online researching it first?

You argue that there really is an audience on the web. But is there enough know-how in Switzerland to actually create good online advertising?

Switzerland has a vibrant creative community and a strong advertising industry. In the early 90s web advertising was tough, but these days the models for its use are tried and tested, the creative formats all standardised and the media planning techniques well established. Talking with online teams in Zurich, it’s clear that the talent is already here.

What does good online advertising look like?

It’s like good advertising in any media. It’s engaging, relevant and effective. What’s different in online is the scope the media planners have to cut out the high levels of wastage in classic media that mean people are forever exposed to adverts that are not necessarily relevant.

Some of my current favourites are on the case studies pages that support our Digital Training Academy for online advertisers and their agencies. We have no affiliations to any particular agency or media owner and no one can pay to be there, but the training case studies will give you a sense of stuff that’s caught my eye recently… www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/casestudies/

You are convinced that engagement marketing is more efficient than interruptive marketing. Why is that?

The tide is turning in marketing. We’re crossing into a new era that places people in control of the commercial messages they receive. It doesn’t happen over night, but if you’re reading this, then the chances are that you’re already experiencing some of this new era of media editing. Maybe you fastforward through the TV commercials, maybe you leave the junk mail unopened in your recycled bin, online maybe you skip those mails you recognise as being from brands you don’t want to talk with. Interruptive marketing may still grab attention much of the time, but the new era of engagement marketing gains customers attention.

Consumers are increasingly overload by ads on all channels. Why would they feel the need to actively participate in advertising?

We’re all over loaded. Overloaded with information and with advertising. And the onus is on the research folks to prove the effectiveness of advertising in different media. What I’m seeing is simply a massive shift between the classic channels and the way savvy marketers approach the new digital channels.

For example, back in the mid-nineties the online marketing industry’s research agenda was all about how online could build brands, proving that the exposure to banners worked in a way comparable to press or outdoor. Did banners build brands? Yes. At the time, the research was revolutionary, uncovering a mathematical certainty and a truth of this new media channel for the very first time. Fast-forward to today and it’s about the brand building power of all media; mashed up together in a new diet of consumer behaviour, what should the advertiser’s mix be? Where exactly does online fit? The new battleground is integration.

Just one simple example of this is the role of search engines in an integrated campaign. The likes of Google and Yahoo are now digging into the relationship between TV and the web, and how marketing activity on TV triggers an uplift in searched online. They’ve confirmed that the combination of online and offline delivers the best yield and drives better awareness. But they’ve also proved how search can connect customers from TV campaigns to the right websites – after all, how many of us remember all those URLs? The implication is that any TV campaign which doesn’t have some search engine support to close the loop, is simply losing some of its customers.

By helping experienced online advertisers improve their media mix, this is also revealing the reality that ‘best practice’ is still evolving.