Growing up in England, pre-show cinema ads were as integral to the experience of going to the pictures as the pall of smoke hanging over the balcony seats and the muffled sounds of slap and tickle from the back of the theatre. Forty or so years on, I still remember a spot for Benson & Hedges, featuring Peter Sellars, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe – the Goons.

The precondition for a successful marriage between advertising execution and medium is that there is a degree of symbiosis between the two. A truth so obvious it should be axiomatic. Except lately, it’s almost invariably overlooked, particularly in reference to the web.

In a recent post Brian Morrissey says: “This unflinching belief in advertising as the catchall monetization tool came out of the strange Valley culture… The VCs, analysts and entrepreneurs all bought into this idea that if you build a large enough audience, you have a media business.”

Advertising hasn’t proven the monetizing panacea it was assumed to be because the people who fund, develop and manage web-based businesses know the square root of buggery bollocks about advertising. Which is a bit like the people responsible for laying track being ignorant of anything to do with trains. Despite this modest shortcoming the geeks act like they invented it. Just as their web 1.0 bubblehead predecessors were convinced they’d invented branding, which they mistook for a lower case, sans serif typeface.

This is compounded by billions of dollars worth of researching the bleeding obvious to tell us that consumers don’t like or trust ads. Oh well, there you have it, advertising must be dead then. Well after, several decades of enduring lukewarm lasagna washed down with tepid chardonnay behind the one-way mirror, it is an article of faith for me that the trillions of dollars of utterly surplus to requirement consumer goods are eagerly purchased by people who: “don’t like advertising”, “have never read the copy in an ad”, are “never affected by advertising”, “have never once bought anything because of an ad”, “refuse to be manipulated by ads”. Oh, and they couldn’t care less what other people think of them either.

Eyeballs don’t equate to an audience; to be an audience they have to pay attention, however fleeting. The majority of advertising on the web has nothing to do with why people are there. TV advertising may be “interruptive”, but at least it bears some resemblance to the overall experience of watching TV. Kate Moss lolling semi naked all over the furniture is reasonably consonant with the experience of delving into the lurid lives of the “vile bodies” in the pages of Vanity Fair. Relevant classified ads are consistent if not down right useful when searching Google.

And funny and cinematic spots featuring famous comedy stars have a reasonable chance of grabbing the attention of even the most ardent groper in the back row of the stalls.