According with the Timesonline, Google has beaten ITV in advertising revenue, the search engine giant has earned £327 million last summer compared to £317 Million by ITV. At a time when the future of advertising is highly discussed and the number of people with access to broadband internet increases. These figures come to show that online advertising, and search engines will become an essential part of any successful integrated marketing communications plan.

This year Google has already earned  £9.25 million in advertising revenue, £54 million more than it did for the whole of last year when it surpassed channel 4's. ITV on the other hand is expected to face a revenue's drop of 7%.

One of the reasons why online advertising has become so popular is due to the limited amounts of restrictions when compared to television and other traditional media such as press and radio, advertisers like the fact that they can be more creative online. Due to this fact ITV is looking  to loosen its restrictions to increase its advertising revenue. "Google, whose advertising revenues have overtaken Channel 4’s and which has 75 per cent of the search advertising market, is wholly unregulated. Yet ITV labors under a host of anachronistic proscriptions about what it can and can’t do" - Michael Grade, the executive chairman.

Very few people however seem to be skeptical about the power and future of online advertising and search engine marketing, discarding Google as a "brand finder" as opposed to a "brand builder". However figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau show that if it was not for online advertising value growth (41%) the overall value of UK advertising would have fallen by 19%.

The internet is and will remain a viable and successful platform to communicate with your customers. As per the Internet Statistics Compendium, 91% of adults who have used the internet, use a search engine to find information. It would then make sense to optimize your website for search engines so that users would be able to find you.