Not ye olde banners

eMarketer, a market-research firm, predicted that online-advertising spending in America, which makes up about half the global total, will increase by 8.9% in 2009, rather than the 14.5% it had forecast in August. The firm thinks search advertising will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%, whereas display ads will grow by 6.6%. In short, online advertising will continue to expand in the recession -- just not as quickly as previously expected. Online marketing increasingly aims for awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty all at once. Marketing managers can therefore defend their online budgets as being both above and below the line. The industry is also cautiously excited about two new forms of online advertising. The first is video and the second is social networks. Two years ago 11% of time spent online was at Yahoo! and MSN, two web portals; now their share is down to 5%, and 5% of online time is spent at YouTube and Facebook. Online traffic, in other words, is moving towards sites where advertising has so far proved ineffective and is therefore cheap. This, says Ms Meeker, presents an opportunity for innovation and arbitrage by clever marketing managers as they cut their conventional ad budgets. It may also provide a glimmer of hope for the advertising industry as it enters recession.