Former BSkyB sales director Mark Chippendale has delivered a wake-up call to the online advertising world, claiming it is not fulfilling its creative potential.
Mr Chippendale, who was given a new pan-European role of regional vice-president of media sales at Yahoo! in August, said advertising creatives and internet media owners are to blame for the current state of online advertising.
"We are partly to blame as we need to get out there and inspire the creatives to want to work with the online medium," he said.
"We haven't communicated the opportunities that exist to creatives. We haven't excited them enough."
Mr Chippendale does not regard the overall standard as bad, but believes the online industry needs more often to create advertising as memorable as the Smash Martians, which became an unlikely hit after promoting instant mashed potato.
"Broadband has only taken off in the past two years, which is not very long for creatives to get their head around what can be done. We should be the ones exposing them to the opportunities," he said.
"At Yahoo! we believe online has been in a creative silo for too long and that in fact it is able to take the best attributes of other media and amplify them for a very engaged audience."
Mr Chippendale said the use of broadband to deliver TV advertising online was ripe for improvement.
"Too many people think that 'great - broadband exists I will just put my TV advert on it'.
"I think they should be cleverer about how they translate their TV adverts to online because web pages have different dwell times," he said.
"Online has greater scope than any other single medium for delivering on the most creative communication ideas.
"If you are online, you can be a TV advert, a radio advert or a press advert. You can be all of that on steroids."
Mr Chippendale's move from his 14-year stint at Sky Media, where he rose to become director of sales, to Yahoo! Europe mirrors an advertising shift from TV to online.
Online advertising revenues are growing strongly, as more people subscribe to broadband, which allows for more sophisticated adverts.
Boosting advertising revenue is a prime concern of Yahoo!, which has been punished by investors this year despite sharply increased profits.
Today the company attempts to boost creativity in the industry by launching a new series of creative awards aimed at students.
The inaugural Yahoo! Sharpener Awards, so named as a reference to the famous D&AD Creative awards that famously come in the form of a yellow or black pencil, asks students to create an advertising brief for Yahoo! Music Unlimited.
The prize is a three-month paid placement across four creative media agencies within the Omnicom Group.
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