Last Christmas I bought an app for my smartphone called 'Jamie's Oliver's 20-minute meals'. Some time later I found out that it was the biggest selling app in Britain during the Christmas period.

I was impressed. I did not fully grasp at the time what a brilliant bit of branding this was for Team Oliver.

Essentially this was a clever ad for Jamie Oliver's work that in turn gave me something useful – 20 recipes that can, theoretically, be prepared and cooked in 20 minutes… though I have yet to achieve the timing here. More like 30-40 minutes in my case.

This type of online or digital advertising that is cleverly dressed up as something useful or enjoyable is all part of the emerging trend of digital marketing and advertising.

Once online ads (for want of a better term) were an afterthought. Now they form the core marketing strategy for many of the world's biggest brands. Companies such as Google have, quite literally, transformed advertising and the way we consume media.

Current wisdom points to digital advertising holding a 9%-12% grip on the market and that will only rise. It also has not been dealt the same harsh recessionary blow as traditional advertising avenues because entry costs are so much lower and results more traceable.

Stephen Conmy, editor and co-founder of Digital Times magazine and its companion website www.digitaltimes.ie, said digital marketing was more than just banner ads on websites – it encompasses social media, web, mobile, viral video, gaming ads and so on. "Digital marketing and digital media are very much intertwined and they include a whole range of things that people might not consider advertising," he noted.

And that is the inherent cleverness about this new stream of marketing and advertising – as we submerge ourselves ever further into the digital world, the structures of traditional advertising are breaking down and being replaced by much more stealthy campaigns – the advertising wolf in sheep's clothing.

Conmy believes advertising now has to be far more utilitarian. In other words, the ads have to give people something. Thus marketing has changed from being a push method to a functional one which is giving the consumer more in return for the information they allow the marketeers to have.

Conmy pointed to the smartphone apps as a great example of this notion. Here you have something that potentially adds value if the application gives the consumer something practical. For example, Kraft foods was the first to market with an app that gave consumers more than 7,000 recipes. Naturally, there were Kraft brands in those recipes and, cleverly, details of the stockists where the ingredients could be found.

According to Conmy, Volkswagen spent $500,000 developing an app for the launch of its 2010 Golf GTI mark 6. The application was a racing game but it also had a list and location of all Volkswagen dealers where people could sign up for a test drive through the app. "This was one of the most downloaded bits of software in America at the time. It drove sales and was probably more effective than the millions it spent on its TV and radio advertising – it reaped huge benefits for them," said Conmy.

The make-up of the audience targeted for digital marketing is predominantly what is termed digital 'natives' – those who have grown up with technology as opposed to those who have not.

According to Conmy 'natives' are far more cynical as well. "They are a different type of consumer and probably more difficult to target – while they are brand-conscious they don't like to be pigeon-holed or grouped. And for them it's also about how good the product is as well as the creative side," he said.

Of course, one of the biggest boons to digital advertising has been the emergence of social networks. Here, marketing folk are targeting whole communities of like-minded people.

Advertisers will always follow the money and go where the consumers are. Obviously, digital advertising is no different. Targeting 400 million users on networks such as Facebook is a no-brainer because these people tend to be young, "dynamic" and brand-conscious. Furthermore, they also consume different types of media at the same time.

Conmy said digital marketeers have recognised that these groups of people have very different media-consumption patterns and expect their online experience to be free, their information to be entertaining and easily shared.

"We're moving into a real-time world with news, search, information and so on. The only way this is going to be funded is through advertising and the challenge the advertisers have is to make their product relevant. They can't just throw messages at people anymore – you have to understand your consumer and give them something in return."