Ran across "Five Mobile Trends for 2010" in AdAge, and two caught my eye:

• Advertising's outdoor real estate is fast becoming another
  connected channel capable of delivering high-fidelity digital
  experiences as unique, varied and measurable as more well-established
  mediums.  An example: Toyota's iPhone app that let users draw on the Thompson-Reuters screen in Times Square.

• Consumers have new power to express their opinions through
  social technologies from anywhere, anytime. Smart marketers will do all
  they can to encourage and act on this real-time feedback.  Example: AT&T's iPhone app, Mark the Spot, which crowdsources areas of weak reception.

The "connective tissue" between these — and all the others on the list, actually — is interaction. That is, drawing consumers back in to the advertising itself, a medium that they've been trying desperately to tune out for years. Yes, you do occasionally see some appreciation for the form, like during the Super Bowl or annual retrospectives. But for the most part, people see ads as either too irrelevant (white noise) or too relevant, with frightening levels of intrusiveness.

So is it in fact time for the big reversal, enabled by mobile? Consumers taking back control, either by choosing which ads to receive (think mobile coupons) or actually contributing to the message by using their phones to instantly share thoughts about products, services, brands?

If that's the case, it'll be an interesting couple of years. The one warning I would issue is to make sure brands, publishers, and technology developers are not ignoring an important demographic: the slow adapters. Sure, it's great to enable all of this for the tech-savvy youth, for the gung-ho fans, for the Foursquare mayors. But if you don't make these new mediums accessible to the middle ground — those that will never be heavy users, will never be "obsessed," who don't read Mashable daily — you're going to miss out on the opportunity for widespread adoption. Easy come, easy go.

Interpublic's Magna unit has revised its December doomsayer forecast that US ad revenues would decline by 1.3% in 2010 to saying that they'll just be kinda flat. down just 0.1% from last year. View report (pdf).

Online ad revenues, on the other hand, will curve upward: direct online ad spend is projected to jump 12.2%. Local online spending will grow 3.7%, Magna said.

Excluding the effects of the Olympics and local elections, advertising revenue will be $161 billion in 2010, and the entire ad economy will rise 1.4%. And apparently, the worst is over: Q1 will be the last period of decline, the unit said.

Don't bust out the champagne quite yet, but you can start thinking positively now.

Last year we saw a enormous amount of deals struck between search giants and real-time data providers, aka social networks and microblogging sites.

• In October, Microsoft signed search deals with Facebook and
  Twitter to integrate real-time status updates and tweets
  into Bing's search results.
• Google followed suit in early December with the announcement that public updates from social media sites Twitter, Facebook and MySpace will start showing up in Google's general search results, a particularly nifty feature for smartphones.
• Even more proof in the pudding, this time from M&A (via TheDeal.com): Real-time search engine developer OneRiot Inc. closed its $7 million Series C, bringing the total venture capital raised to $27 million.

But real-time search is "not there yet," as proven by the magnitude 4.1 earthquake that took place in our ever-shifting city this week. At 10am on Thursday, a small earthquake shook the Bay Area, and within 6 minutes Google search was reflecting the event in the form of Twitter updates, according to Stephen Shankland
at CNET. (Google claims it was just 2 minutes, and Shankland attributes the lag to the fact that he was in Detroit at the time. And clearly, people in Detroit don't give a hoot about California.)

But while we can quibble over minutes, the takeaway here is that real-time search is certainly where it's at for the coming year, but it's going to be up to marketers to figure out how that can work for their brand. To be honest, it's a little scary that a real-time tweet about your company from some Joe in Minnesota can trump your hard-earned spot for your company website, blog, newsletter, video, or special deal — though it does introduce some exciting possibilities, like having access to top sellers and current sentiment data, and eventually, pairing real-time news with real-time ads.