How does a man with a degree in electronics end up in advertising?

It's a question I ask myself a lot, as I am that man. It wasn't a sequence of poor or inspired career choices that lead to my current employment. It was the internet.

According to a report commissioned by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) some £867 million was spent advertising online in 2005, accounting for 5.6 per cent of the UK entire advertising spend.

I effectively worked my way up the digital advertising ladder. I started out as a humble chip designer. Then I moved up to computer systems and on to programming. Next I became a networking expert, in the days when that meant getting computers to talk to each other, not eating canapes and swapping business cards.

Then the web happened and thanks to Tim Burners Lee, I became one of marketing's most deadly henchmen - a web expert.

UK business now spends more advertising online than they do on radio. More stag-geringly, according to the IAB report, more money is now spent on website advertising

than on bill boards in the UK.

Never mind splitting the atom, who'd have thought the humble electron that I learnt so much about all those years ago could be used to convince people to buy Pepsi instead of Coke?

But who clicks on all these banner ads?

On average banner ads achieve less than two per cent click-through. Most of us ignore them and would rather stay on the website we had intended to visit.

So why are online advertising budgets getting bigger if there is so little traffic return on their investment?

Thanks to widespread broadband adoption and really clever browser technology, online advertisers no longer have to wait for your consensual click to pedal their wares.

Browser technology, collectively known as 'Rich Media', means advertisements don't have to wait till we click to take over our screens. We are no longer being politely invited to visit their site, but interacting with their brand on the website we are currently on.

Suddenly, mainstream advertisers, who fuel the $60 billion television advertising engine, have started to pay a ttention to the online medium.

Rich Media ads can have sound, video, animation, interactivity, product demos, and games, elevating the medium from a passive one to a creative vehicle capable of brand impact.

It also turns out that we are 50 per cent more likely to click on a real media ad than click on a traditional banner - even though most of these clicks are on the close or exit button.

Advertisers can now annoy and interrupt our web viewing, just like they can on television - assuming the host website has been paid enough to let them. They can track the time people spent interacting with the ads and monitor o ther levels of user engagement.

And it's all my fault - and that of other pixel herders, who, like me, ended up in advertising! n Chris is managing director of internet consultancy WAA WebXpress. This and other unedited articles can be found at webxpress.com. E-mail chris@webxpress.com