Media: All About ... Interactive Advertising Bureau.(Guy Phillipson, chief executive officer)

A new chief aims to capitalise on his client credentials.

It's a bit like what they used to say about Tony Blair's constituency of Sedgefield: pin a Labour rosette on a donkey and it would still win by a street. Likewise, you'd have to be spectacularly inept to make a hash of things at the Interactive Advertising Bureau these days.

Internet advertising has already overtaken cinema's market share and may soon surpass radio. It claims to be the fastest-growing medium in history - and growth in revenue is still lagging behind growth in audiences. It has history on its side.

So, even with the most modest of ambitions, anyone charged with responsibility for marketing the medium is going to look as if they're doing a hell of a job.

The IAB, though, has more than modest ambitions; after all, its new chief executive, Guy Phillipson, is no donkey. Phillipson, who this week succeeds Danny Meadows-Klue as the chief executive, joins from Vodafone, where he was the head of advertising, in command of a pounds 60 million annual budget.

Phillipson's priority in his new role is to get out and see as many people as possible, especially on the client side; and knowing something of their mindset will be to his advantage, he says. There are two possible sources of growth: getting existing users to spend more; and persuading those who haven't been using the medium to start (at the very least) trying it out.

Phillipson is looking forward to tackling the latter, particularly FMCG advertisers - a sector that has been conspicuously absent from the medium to date. But he feels that a vital element in conversation with all advertisers - existing users as well as virgins - will be to impress upon them the merits of online as a branding medium. That, he says, will be central to its next stage of development.