This guest post was written by: Manuela Tangredi 

The recent financial crisis is rapidly expanding to real economy causing a decline in consumption and production growth and thus a cut-down in advertising budgets is to be expected.

On the contrary this week, eMarketer, a market research firm, predicted that in America online advertising will continue to expand even during the recession. Similarly, online advertising spending is estimated to increase by 8,9% in 2009, less than what was forecasted before August, but still encouraging. Search advertising will probably lead with the highest spending growth (14,9%), rich-media ads will grow by 7,5%, and display ads by 6,6%.

Online advertising should suffer less than other channels and that’s probably because it is more interactive and trackable than any other ad format, thus making it less speculative, as The Economist put it (November 29th issue). Moreover, web marketing is able to reach different objectives at the same time: generating brand awareness and recall–stimulating consumer’s preferences and loyalty.

We have a reason to believe that in Europe there is even more room for expansion for new media marketing especially considering that online channels are far from exploiting their potential and they still represent a relatively cheap marketing strategy.

Excitement in the sector is driven by the huge opportunities represented by video advertising and social networks. Still these new forms have been difficult to exploit so far: Video Ads easily reach consumers when placed next to user-generated contents (YouTube-style), however I believe some kind of monitoring should take place in order to decide which kinds of videos display your ads. Alternatively, ads may be displayed next to professionally produced videos (ie: Hulu video site, available only in the United States).

Equally so, social networks like MySpace or Facebook generate interest by making preferences circulate among friends who most likely are to trust one another and also have similar tastes. It’s also true that users participate in these network in different ways for more than just looking for things to buy.

There is no doubt marketers are experimenting these channels at a fast pace and it mostly due to the fact that difficulties in exploiting them are making them quite affordable so far.