NEW MEDIA: SPOTLIGHT ON IPA DIGITAL MARKETING GROUP - A new agenda for IPA's digital group as Owen takes the lead.

The IPA's Digital Marketing Group's new chairman has plans, Alasdair Reid writes.

The IPA's Digital Marketing Group has a new chairman: John Owen, the communications director of Starcom Motive. This may come as something of a surprise - largely because you've probably forgotten that the IPA even has a Digital Marketing Group.

This is not to imply criticism of the committee's previous work or indeed of its outgoing chairman, Alan McCulloch, formerly the client services director of Zentropy Partners. But it does reflect the fact that digital media is home to an alphabet soup of trade body acronyms.

It's also in no small part a reflection of the fact that, since the dotcom bubble popped a couple of years back, there has been a crisis of confidence in the ad industry regarding digital - especially online advertising. And as the recession loomed, many agency groups hived off much of their digital expertise into their direct marketing arms and thus, potentially, outside the remit of the IPA.

This has led to increased debate about exactly where digital lies within the marketing mix - and, indeed, whether the trade body most likely to take a lead in this area is actually the Direct Marketing Association.

DMA-affiliated agencies, for instance, account for more of the UK's online advertising market than IPA agencies.

This has led to some media and ad agencies feeling somewhat adrift - a situation that was put into perspective a few months back when the Internet Advertising Bureau, which primarily represents online publishers, issued an idiots' guide to online advertising. The tone of this document infuriated many ad agency creatives working in the digital field.