Internet advertising revenues to keep growing?

The latest figures of the IAB show that Q3/2008 Internet advertising revenue for Internet advertising rose by over 11% compared to the same period of 2007. While some people feel that this is a "proof" showing earlier assertions that interactive and online marketing would not suffer and possibly benefit from the ongoing economic crisis, the question is open as to the sustainability of what appears to be a healthy situation. My take is that:

1. advertisers are going to seriously reduce their spending at least for some time if not for reasons of substance at least to achieve cosmetic impacts on their quarterly figures and send a message to their employees;
2. the commercial efforts required for agencies to sell their services will increase very substantially making life very difficult for ad agencies that do not have ciritcal mass whether in terms of finances or in terms of personnel;
3. advertisers are poised to become much more demanding when it comes to getting verifiable and measurable impacts resulting from any interactive initiative, something that basically makes it even more relevant today to have adequate infrastructure and personnel for reliable and consistent web analytics

Let's see what happens.

Comments

[Rolv Heggenhougen]

Companies seem to ignore the single largest online advertising venue available: their own regular external emails. Why not use these emails to market the senders company?

You have a website.
You send emails.

Why not multiply your sales-staff by “wrapping” the regular email in an interactive letterhead?

No other marketing or advertising medium is as targeted as an email between people that know each other (as opposed to mass emails). These emails are always read and typically kept.