Magna 2010 Ad Forecast: Q1 Will See Last of Declines

Just a few months after predicting that US ad revenues would decline by 1.3% in 2010, Interpublic’s Magna unit has revised its projections, and now forecasts (pdf) that advertising revenues will be essentially flat this year, down just 0.1% from 2009.

In its January 2010 forecast update, Magna said it expects advertising revenue will be $161 billion, excluding the effects of the Olympics and local elections, MediaBuyerPlanner writes. Including Olympics and election spending, the US ad economy will rise 1.4%. The first quarter of 2010 will be the final quarter of decline during this most recent recession, according to Magna. U.S. advertising fell 15.5% in 2009, Magna estimates.

December Search Share: Google Flat, Bing Rises in Expanded Rankings

Americans conducted 14.7 billion core searches on the top five search engines in December 2009, an increase of 2% over November 2009, according to the latest qSearch data from comScore, Inc. Google searches accounted for nearly 66% of these queries.

Google Sites led the US search market pack in December with 65.7% of the searches conducted, virtually unchanged from 65.6% in November 2009. Google is followed by #2 Yahoo Sites (17.3%, down 0.2 points), and #3 Microsoft Sites (10.7%, up 0.4 points). Ask Network captured 3.7% of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.6%, comScore said.

How Google’s Speeding Things Up Could Affect You

Google’s need for speed could begin to influence the transition to the next generation of search and page-ranking factors in query results, as the company makes a transition to Caffeine, the next-generation of Google Search. While the move to speed up the Internet mostly touches Google’s architecture and organic search results, some search marketers believe the move affects search advertisers, too.

Google has made a concerted effort during the last half of 2009 to speed things up and improve processing. Speed, or the time it takes to process information, has become a consistent theme as the company began work on the next version of its search architecture, Caffeine.

Google began previewing Caffeine to webmasters in August. Last year, Matt Cutts wrote on his blog to expect Caffeine after the holidays, confirming that speed will become a ranking factor on Google.

Hey Chatterbox: Report Sets Sites On Social Media Mavens

“Conversationalist” could become the next important target for marketers looking to connect with consumers. A Forrester Research study released Tuesday shows that one in every three online Americans is a “Conversationalist,” someone who updates their status on a social networking site such as Facebook or posts updates on Twitter at least once weekly.

Conversationalists are younger than the average adult consumer—56% female, with household incomes slightly above average and more likely than other social classifications to hold a college degree. And they’re not just young people. Seventy percent are ages 30 or older. In fact, 36% are 18 to 29; 37% are 30 to 43; 14% are 44 to 53; 9% are 54 to 64; and 4% are 65 and older.

Age has become less of an important factor. The day has come when grandma searches the Internet for goods and services, and now she’s making her way to social networks, says Josh Bernoff, senior vice president at Forrester Research.

True Cost Of An Email Campaign

Since the advent of email marketing in the mid-1990s, companies have embraced the misconception that email is virtually “free” as a marketing medium. This false impression often leads to over-communication—which, in turn, triggers diminished response rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. Even marketers who are sensitive to email recklessness sometimes face internal pressures, such as end-of-year revenue numbers, to send “one last blast to the entire database” with the justification that “it doesn’t cost us anything.”

So what is the true cost of an email campaign? To understand true cost, you need to first understand your marketing database a little better. The names within it are not all equally engaged, and your actions affect this level of engagement.