New figures from the IAB Online Adspend study, with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, reveal that in the first six months of 2006, the UK market was worth 917.2m, up 40.3%% on the previous year. And yet the fast moving consumer goods industry is still slow to accept the opportunities of online marketing.

New figures from the IAB Online Adspend study, with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, reveal that in the first six months of 2006, the UK market was worth 917.2m, up 40.3%% on the previous year. And yet the fast moving consumer goods industry is still slow to accept the opportunities of online marketing.

With diminishing returns from spend on TV promotions, newspapers, magazines and radio, FMCGs must find an alternative form of marketing. However, many see the inability to measure impact as a reason for not integrating them into marketing programmes.

But marketers can influence consumers' grocery purchasing behaviour through online campaigns. Online printable coupons, for example, provide insight into consumer response and allow brands to track consumers' behaviour from the point of clicking on a website to redeeming the coupon in store.

In the UK, printable coupons are expected to attain a 15%% share of the four billion coupons distributed annually by the end of 2007. If FMCGs fail to embrace the technology facilitating inte ation, they will lose the ability to nurture the direct consumer to brand interaction that is key to FMCG