Last year the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland set up ICAN, a company which facilitates agencies that want to buy on-line advertising. With more and more people using the Internet (a million people a week read The Irish Times on the Web), it is very much the big new thing with advertisers. Banner ads - those rectangle spaces at the top of home pages with messages about anything from beer to offshore banking - are the most common form advertisements on the web take.

The Internet is virtually tailor-made for the whole concept of direct marketing. If you are checking out a particular site, you are probably a fairly specific type, and will probably share a "need" with other people checking it out. Moreover, once you start interacting with a site (purchasing things, etc), they can learn even more about you. Advertisers' heaven.

The special thing about website advertising is this interactivity. Consumers can choose how much information they want, and if they are especially big Heiniken fans, for example, they can click on the ad and spend time on the Heiniken website. But if you advertise somewhere like The Irish Times on the Web, this will cost you. There are no free links - take readers away from the virtual newspaper, and you pay the price.