Richard Siddle comment October

What's your current favourite TV advert? Chances you are have to stop and think. Ask the same questions 10 to 15 years ago and they would be dropping off the tongue. Whenever ITV run through the top 100 TV commercials of all time it is always the classics from the 70s, 80s and 90s that come top of the list. The Smash advert with the robots from out of space won the last run down I saw. 

Innovation and TV advertising are becoming pushed further apart by increasingly restrictive rules and regulations about what adverts can and can't do. Drinks advertising has been affected more than any other sector. We must all have our own favourite drinks advert over the years.

Our cover star, Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins and Cinzano, Griff Rhys Jones and Marilyn Monroe and all those classic Carling Black Label adverts and most recently Peter Kaye and his John Smith adverts. What they all have in common is they were made to make us laugh. Something the regulatory authorities will no longer allow.

It is partly why in the last couple of years online and digital advertising has overtaken TV as the main advertising avenue for our major brands. As social networking has taken over how we communicate with each other so the advertisers have followed. No doubt acting before the authorities ban TV drinks advertising completely.

A straightforward 45-second TV commercial also pales into significance when you can get involved with far more innovative, direct, targeted advertising straight to someone's phone, PC or home. This summer we have seen a host of drinks brands getting up to all sorts of high jinks on the internet and even pulling in top name bands to perform on their behalf at their own rock festivals.

We may look back and reminisce about the good ol days of Leonard Rossiter urging Joan Collins to "get her hair down, sweetie" and then pouring Cinzano all over her, but it is more likely to have been dreamt up a viral campaign these days than an original TV advert.

• Harpers Says...