Ad agencies. Don't be Canutes. Go with the tide of a 'Digital Britain'.

Last Week, Campaign’s editorial stance echoed the views of its columnist Russell Davies: ‘The Digital Revolution is over and done’. The battle’s finished. ‘Digital won’. End of’. Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Report, published today, is further reinforcement if any were needed, that it's not just the battle but the war that's over and done. 'Digital Britain' shows clear intent and total commitment to a digital future. For Gordon Brown, The Report will stand as one of the rare visionary successes on his watch (to rank alongside his G8 leading record on the millennium goals and his international leadership of the financial crisis). It will herald a sea-change in the way Britons consume digital media. For too long there has been a disparity between online access (60% of UK households) and the relative lack of interest (42% of adults have no use or desire for broadband). Currently only 6% of online users watch television on the web. And yet video clips, mainly from YouTube and i-player programmes, account for more than a third of all broadband traffic. So now the coast is clear. As satellite broadband reaches 100% of the UK population, as costs go down and speeds increase, and as Lord Carter forces public services broadcasters to share their assets to make quality content more widely available online, so the sheer ubiquity, ease of use and convenience of the web will make it the medium of choice for mainstream consumers of programming and advertising. And, most significantly, that includes the offline majority – that army of digital immigrants and refuseniks who have up until now rejected any stake in a digital future. This is the way the tide is flowing for consumers, agencies and clients. And that tide is moving fast. To pretend otherwise is to behave like a Canute.

IDM LAUDS RECESSION-PROOF MARKETING AS SALLY GUNNEL PRAISES CHOCOLATE SOUFFLE

Last night, I went along to the IDM Business Performance Awards. It was really heartening to see an industry which, far from broken, appears robust and optimistic.

For me, having worked through three recessions, it reaffirmed one overriding truth. In those sectors most vulnerable to recession - service industries, travel and leisure, retail and charity - good insight-based creative marketing is one of the few guarantors of stability and growth.

Waterstone's led the way by netting the Diamond Award with a loyalty programme that resulted in significant increases in basket value, transactions and sales. Acquiring 2.8 million cardholders is no mean feat in a difficult trading environment.

Silver went to Visit Scotland who have succeeded in bringing in £18 million of incremental spend by increasing frequency and value of visits through their 'Keep Discovering' loyalty programme (and no doubt capitalising on the recessionary trend for 'staycations').

By activating dormant users, free restaurant booking service Toptable.com has used e-CRM to drive up bookings by 76% in a year. And Radisson Edwardian have used highly targeted paid search which highlights the USP's of each hotel to drive growth in food and drink and occupancy rates. The mood was definitely up at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington.

In keeping with the evening's theme of resilience, even awards host Sally Gunnel appears to be surviving the recession in rude health as she held forth on the subject of winning. Apparently, the night after her gold medal run in Barcelona thirteen years ago (an achievement which entailed years of self-denial), she succumbed to a yearning for a Big Mac. Walking in through the golden arches of MacDonalds in the Olympic Village (don't ask), she was greeted by a Spanish burger flipper who'd recognised the star athlete from her triumph of the night before.

The girl, clearly in awe, led Gunnel to a table where she proceeded to lay a table cloth, set a place with real cutlery and bring a groaning tray of everything supersize - Big Mac, large fries, shake, apple pie, the works. Forget the instant adoration, the Michelin-star rezzies or the chauffeur -driven lifestyle that comes with winning a Olympic Gold and achieving overnight celebrity. For Gunnel, this - the silver service Big Mac and fries - was what winning was all about.

She then went on to praise the chocolate souffle.

Digital is an ideas-rich, sales-generating medium and I can prove it to Steve Harrison

It's okay to put forward a provocative argument provided that the reverse of your argument could also be true.

So how many times do we have to listen to Steve Harrison saying the blindingly obvious - that offline or online, it's all about the idea. I haven't read his new book 'How to do better creative work' - it's out this week and I look forward to it - but I have ingested his piece in Campaign ('Advertising is not dead, and I can prove it to you', 5 June 2009) and it's left me with heartburn.

In it, Steve suggests that both on and offline clients and agency people have been taken for a ride by digital's pundits telling us advertising is on its knees. I'm with Steve up to that point.

But why doesn't he stop there? It's when he goes on to do a total hatchet job on digital that his argument enters the realms of dogma. First off, he marginalises the whole online world by telling us it's populated by indifferent and bored (mainly young) people with no time on their hands and even less money.

The majority, he concludes, continue to operate much as they ever have, in a supine relationship with brands and consuming 'push' messages - mainly offline - and mainly of patchy quality.

Steve opines: 'having grown up with a passive relationship with media, the shift to becoming an active consumer of ideas is neither likely nor desirable. Are smart clients going to wait patiently for the 'groundswell' to eventually envelope these potential customers? And then will they accept a new status quo wherein the customer dictates the flow of marketing communications? Clients will be expecting you to proactively attract and convert new prospects, persuade competitors' customers to defect and encourage existing customers to spend more'.

When he talks about sales-generating, interruptive ideas and digital, it's as if he's talking about two mutually exclusive principles. You can't help thinking that Steve is taking as narrow and patrician a view of the world as the digital pundits he so roundly condemns.

Isn't the truth somewhere in the middle? That, within three years, all these distinctions - advertising, DM and digital - will be redundant. It will be about what works.

So here's my response to Steve's 'Advertising is not dead, and I can prove it to you'. Digital is an ideas-rich, sales-generating medium and I can prove it to you.

Argos's Giant Jar competition online was so popular that it was one of the five most viewed videos on You Tube. It attracted 479,000 unique page impressions and video views in a little over 9 weeks, generated 100,000 competition entries and, crucially, captured over 16,000 unique new customers, resulting in over £700,000 worth of incremental sales with an overall ROI of 4.38:1. It was dramatic and relevant, used a massively interruptive creative idea, deployed film and an immersive interactive game allied to a traditional sales promotion technique - the prize draw.

In his article, Steve trashes the prize draw as a technique which attracts an audience with a Readers Digest mentality. People who go for that sort of thing, argues Steve, are who are only interested in free pens and prize draws, not brands or products - somehow not real transactional consumers, just freebie-seeking tyre-kickers.

Would those be the very same tyre-kickers who are capable of contributing hundreds of thousands of incremental smackers to the bottom line for Argos? The Argos experience (and I invite you to add yours) proves Steve Harrison well wide of the mark.

And by the way, Steve, in relation to blogging, it may be that of the UK's online consumers, 'just (sic) 2.8 per cent bother to blog, only (sic) 8.8 per cent read them and 3.7 per cent comment', but that's like saying only 14 per cent of UK consumers shop at Tesco or only 1 per cent of UK consumers read The Times.

That's still one mother load of consumers interacting with each other.