While American journalists are racking their brains for new ways of saying "recession" — "tight" or "shrinking" economy, the "downturn," and my favorite, "tough economic climate" — analysts are trying to find new ways to tell the advertising industry of the effects of the, um, recession.

"There has been a yearly shift in marketing budgets," write some. "A moderate slowdown in ad spend." "Downgraded long-term projections."

Sometimes, they just tell it to us straight: Ad spend down 1.7% in first nine months of 2008. Thanks, TNS.

In case all that honesty starts making us feel bad about 2009 and start collecting funds for Hawaiian vacations for disenfranchised CDs, all we have to is check out eMarketer charts on online ad spend. Yep, still lookin' good. I don't care if it's not 30% anymore. Fifteen, sixteen percent still smacks of growth and and good old fashioned revenue.

Granted, big groups like WPP's GroupM, Enders Analysis, and E-Consultancy, all of which say they'll be happy if they end the year with a 10% growth from 2008.

But as Forrester's Nate Elliot
told ClickZ: "Online will be hurt, just with all channels during a
recession, but the fact is that online is in a better position than
offline." Indeed it is.

By 2013, 155
million of US Internet users will consume some form of user-created
content, up from 116 million in 2008 — and the number of user-generated
content creators will grow by similar proportions, reaching 115 million
in 2013, up from 83 million in 2008.
according to eMarketer.

And everyone loves it. I mean, it's cheap, it drives traffic and engagement, and it can be darn fun to play with. Like putty. This of course assumes that you don't look too deeply into it and try to analyze the psychological identity of the creator, that is, the American public — which I don't recommend doing, ever.

But not everyone, apparently. Advertisers, fearing its "inherently unpredictable" nature, tend to steer clear of it, which puts a lot of pressure on site publishers and social media channels to give them safe havens. But do those really exist? How do you juggle "true" UGC with the need to moderate for quality and relevance?

"If one more person says 'blog' or 'social networking' to me, I'm gonna puke," said the haggard marketing exec. Twice as many marketers said they are "sick" of hearing about Web 2.0 than last year, according to an Anderson Analytics survey for the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG).

But they admit they don’t know much about it. Some 67% of executive marketers consider themselves beginners when
it comes to using social media for marketing purposes, according to a social media marketing study.

Global warming and green marketing are also way less popular this year, as marketers push aside newfangled ideas and go back to basics – putting more focus on the good ol' boys, like research & insights, and satisfying and retaining customers.

After that, marketing ROI, brand loyalty, and segmentation are considered important, marking a serious move back to the core principles of marketing, writes MarketingCharts.

The economy is sucky, that's for sure. And domestic ad spend is projected to go down 10% next year, according to Barclays Capital – which gave a more moderate estimate of 5.5% just two months ago. A drop in local ad spend (12.2%) is supposed to lead the decline, writes All Things Digital.

But internet ad spend will still be splashing in the deep end of the ad pool: spending in the sector is expected to go up 6.1%, Barclays said. Digital experts at the IPG Emerging Media Lab agreed – see Mediapost's coverage for ideas on how tight-wadded marketers seeking accountability are going to fuel online growth.

Keep in mind, though, that internet advertising (display,
search, lead generation, etc.) should account for just 10% of all ad
spending next year.

Still, by 2010, spending in this minority segment will be up 12%…and who knows where the rest will be?

Via Groundswell's 2008 survey of 5,000 people:

Love it or hate it, email marketing is here to stay – even if people stop reading it.

Email open rates have been steadily falling, hitting 13.2% in the first half of 2008, compared with 16.1% in the
first half of 2007 and about 14% in the second half of the year. Click rates sunk to 2.73% from 3.18% in 1H07, according to a November study from MailerMailer (via eMarketer).

Banking/finance,
religious/spiritual, government, and telecommunications have more success than other verticals, according to the study. 

A tip to get a better open rate: Use a short subject header. A subject of less than 35 characters
yielded a higher average open rate (19.6%) and click rate (3.1%) vs. 14.8% and 1.9% for those with 35+ characters.

Still, marketers in all industries – particularly retail – tend to value email marketing over most channels in terms of driving the highest volume of sales, second only to paid search.

Though the online ad market is still growing, with the IAB reporting the first half of '08 growing 15.2% over the same period last year, it's not growing in the "widely awesome" way that it did before, Adotas reports.

It's a good time to be a focused premium vertical ad network with a relatively variable cost structure and a reliable infrastructure that scales up or down, depending on how sales go every month. The overall climate will not likely cool off the launching of new networks, despite a more difficult fund-raising environment.

Yes, funding is limited, and layoffs are pending. Last week the Sequoia-backed AdBrite – in a move to make the ad network cash flow positive and profitable – laid off 40 employees (40% of its total staff) TechCrunch reported.

But wait, what's this here? Mobile ad network AdMob just nabbed $15.7 million in third round funding from – you guessed it – Sequoia's Capital Growth Fund (plus Accel Partners). The two-year old network served 4.5 billion ads across 6,000 mobile sites in November, writes MarketingVOX.

Apparently, it's all about your name. Next time you're thinking, hmm, what can I add on to the word "Ad" that will create a wildly successfull company? Pick abbreviation over trendy mispellings. You won't regret it.

Forget sugar mamas – affluent women are ten times more valuable when they start talking. A study by the New York Times showed that “Marketing Multipliers” – a new subset of rich chicks – use dramatically more online and offline word-of-mouth to
drive increased purchases, writes Social Media Biz (a new resource for aggregated social media news that I just stumbled upon – lowercase intended).

They also spend twice as much on the "good things in life" – you know, consumer electronics and
fashion. (I know, what happened to "wine and vacations"? And when it comes to fashion, boy do they talk about it:

See chart (via MarketingCharts, click to enlarge):

"Marketing Multiplier" women are also:

• Twice as likely to post to blogs or to publish their own web pages, compared to other women
• Mmore discriminating in vetting their online sources: 71% of Marketing
  Multipliers say it is important for an ad to be “on a website that I
  consider trustworthy."
• More likely to seek out in-depth information on products.
• Going to take twice as many trips, and talk more than four times as often about
  travel brands – including hotels, airlines and car rentals – than other
  affluent women.

Our club basketball team used to have to compete with the big bad badminton team for court space in teeny-weeny Dillon Gym – which does not look like a gym at all, but rather, a medieval dining hall.

One day during a particularly poignant battle, one badminton winner – whom I suspect had had a particularly bad day in the Engineering Quad – triumphed over his longtime rival. Dripping with non-sweat, he raised his racket in air and let it lead him in ever-increasing circles, yelling, "I. Am. CHAMPION!"

And this is about how online advertising industry execs might be feeling right now. The financial crisis has finally started hitting marketing budgets, but instead of sucking money equally out of all mediums, it’s pretty much just traditional advertising that is getting smacked down like a badminton birdie.

Here are the numbers, via the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report:

• Internet advertising revenues in the US
  were $11.5 billion in the first six months of 2008, setting yet another new half-year record that
  represents a 15.2% increase over the first half of 2007.
• 2Q’08 was up 12.8% over the same period of 2007 and
  showed just a slight decline of 0.3% from the first quarter.

The rock stars leading the surge are Search and Display. (Nice to meet you.)

• Search revenues totaled almost $5.1 billion for the first six months of
  2008 (up 24% from the $4.1 billion for the same period in 2007)
• Display-related advertising, which includes Display Banner ads, Rich Media, Digital Video, and
  Sponsorship, totaled close to $3.8 billion for first six
  months of 2008, compared to the $3.2 billion reported for the same
  period in 2007, showing about a 19% increase.

When will internet ad spend surpass TV?

Probably not anytime soon, said Michael Sprouse, CMO of Epic Advertising (via BNET).

"However, online ad spend is growing on a percentage basis and will continue to close the gap between TV with each passing month as more and more people realize the inherent qualities and effectiveness of online. Every day, there are advancements made in the online advertising industry that enable more effective advertising, the same can’t be said of TV. And that is what all advertisers, regardless of type, want – effectiveness."

What, then, will become of TV? Some had predicted that the internet would evolve so rapidly that it would eventually become TV – in that freaky, hulk-like way. But over at Forester Research, David Graves has another idea: TV will Become Internet.

In his report, Personal TV: The Reinvention of Television, he basically says that the industry is going to shift – necessarily – over the coming decade, and "personal TV" will become the norm. Ah, but what is that exactly? It’s a screen, with a set-top box that allows users to view both real-time and programmed content (Video on Demand) though partnerships of the networks, the cable operators, and telco companies.(Though, how likely is that? They certainly don’t have a very good cooperative track record.)

Users will be happy because it’ll give them VOD at no cost, as the system will be supported by non-skippable ads. And advertisers will get some cake, too:

TV advertising will thus be prevented from slipping into the depths of irrelevancy through fragmentation and ad skipping, Graves notes.  In exchange for free content, users will be viewing ads, and – thanks to data gathered from the set-top boxes on each consumer – highly targeted ones at that.