Claire Beale on Advertising

We may all be surfers and texters now but we are couch potatoes too

I know what you were doing last night. Don't be coy. We were all at it. More than 25 million of us. Watching TV. It's our national sport. We might have become a nation of click hungry surfers and scab-thumbed texters but god don't you just love just watching telly? Sofas the land over have buttock-shaped sags that pay homage to the power of television.

Oh, TV might not be where the advertising fashion stripes are won these days, though, of course, TV's now as digital as you like. But there's nothing to touch the telly for mass appeal. When was the last time your office was buzzing about a new website or mobi-soap? If it's a mass market, high-impact, quick hit you're looking for, TV scores.

We digitalised masses still love our optical opiate. Last year we watched an average of 3.63 hours of it a day, according to the new IPA TV Trends report, up from 3.60 hours the year before.

Adland, though, has been playing hard to get lately. Creatives love making TV ads (a step closer to Hollywood, eh?). Media agencies love buying TV spots (they've all got eye-wateringly expensive TV departments to justify, and they make more money out of dealing TV airtime than some other media). But they've sniffed blood with ITV's 35-per-cent-slump-in-profits troubles and TV's not quite the adland darling it once was, despite the stirling efforts of TV's marketing jewel: Thinkbox. The trouble is that the ad industry's been flirting madly with the internet (and as an aside, consider how many times in this week's column I'm referring you to a website to see a TV ad).

Mind you, if you were black-tied up at London's Grosvenor House last Wednesday evening, you'd have seen a newly virile TV advertising industry. It was the British Television Advertising Awards and the winning work was stunning: every bit as good – probably better – as anything the rest of the world is producing right now.

The roll-call of prize-takers will be familiar: Ad of the year was Cadbury Dairy Milk's Gorilla, Carling won for best booze ad (the one with the astronauts queuing outside a space nightclub, but one's wearing trainers so they don't get let in), Sony Bravia's Play-Doh bunnies won in the best household appliance category, Skoda's Cake won best car ad, Boots won best retail. All are wonderful. Mother's founders Robert Saville and Mark Waites won the Chairman's Award (a sort of recognition for services to adland creative excellence) and Fallon – responsible for a huge chunk of the category-winning ads – shasay off with the Agency of the Year award.

Yes, it was all pretty predictable. Yes, most of the ads had already notched up a shelf full of trophies. But still the whole event left a warm fuzzy glow. British TV advertising, at its best, is simply brilliant. A bit like the medium that delivers it. Talking of the digital darling, though, "digital" is going to be a redundant word soon enough. One day not far away everything will be digital and the word will become a meaningless distinction. In the meantime, though, there's a thriving digital quarter in Adland and its inhabitants are still enjoying the smugness of specialism.

So it was probably rather disappointing for the digital crew to find "traditional" ad agencies rampaging all over their own specialist awards ceremonies earlier this month. Take the Revolution Awards. Revolution is a magazine about digital communications and its annual awards are prestigious signifiers of excellence in the field.

So the digital agencies must have been a little put out that at last week's ceremony a "traditional" agency, CHI and Partners, took home more gongs than any of the pure-play digital companies. CHI's X-Factor challenge campaign for Carphone Warehouse was a star of the show.

To seal the trend, another "traditional' agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, was named agency of the year at the mobile marketing awards for its stunning work on Lynx/Axe.

I know the specialists will be tempted to shrug off both these events as first swallows of a far off summer. But in fact there are several immediate and obvious conclusions to draw. The big, traditional advertising agencies are now throwing their weight behind awards schemes that previously they couldn't be much bothered to enter. Their interest reflects the growing importance of digital to their businesses (or at least to the marketing of their businesses). Their success proves that a traditional agency's depth of experience, resource, insight, creativity and client relationships makes a formidable formula for younger, leaner digital agencies to match.

The next question is whether digital agencies can ever hope to broaden their service and take home the big trophies at mainstream advertising awards such as the BTAA.

Have you seen the latest Transport for London ad by WCRS? It's called Do The Test. It only ran in a couple of high-profile TV slots last week, so you might have missed it. If you did miss it, log on to dothetest.co.uk and, er, do the test.

Without giving the game away it's an ad about visual cognition. It's very clever and it caught out everybody I know. Clearly, none of us has seen anything like it before.

Unfortunately, though, there has been something almost exactly like it before: a film made by the University of Illinois 10 years ago to demonstrate the theory of spatial awareness. You can see the original on the University of Illinois website.

Anyway, the similarity of the two films has ignited a raging debate about whether it's ever legitimate to copy someone else's work without their permission (as WCRS did). And even if you get permission, what does it say about your creative integrity if all you do is a pretty straight lift of someone else's efforts?

If you ask me (and even if you don't), I think the main question has to be whether the resulting ad delivers for the client: does it work? It might not "work" if the client feels cheated by being given a recycled idea.

And it certainly won't work if the target audience recognises the ad as a cheap rip-off. On both these scores I reckon WCRS's ad gets away with it. And since its whole aim is to encourage motorists to be more vigilant, anything that improves road safety deserves a break.

But a final thought to leave you with. There's a new TFL ad coming. This time it's by M&C Saatchi. It's designed to encourage young drivers to drive more safely. You'll find it on the TFL website. Take a look and then log on to Youtube and seek out Walter Stern's music video for Audio Bullys' 'We Don't Care'. Spot the difference? Me neither.