An interesting, and positive article appeared in The Economist on November 28th about online advertising and how we will be impacted by the faltering economy.

To summarize, although advertising budgets will likely be cut in the coming months/years, there is a good chance that Internet Marketing will be able to defend its usefulness and survive the turmoil.  SEO and other marketing and branding tactics used on the Internet currently allow for actual data to be tracked, and metrics to be provided to a company so that there is justification for where and how the advertising money is spent.  According to the article, “All this makes spending on advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales.”

This is good news for the Interactive Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, and Google Adword agencies out there.  If these forecasters are right, then even in a recession this sector of the economy can still show growth.  As the article points out, we may need to look for different avenues to reach the consumer, such as a focus on social networking sites, but with creativity it should be possible to weather the storm.

But, wait, if it works here, why doesn’t it work elsewhere?  It does, I would argue, work the same across the board for ALL retail products.  Consumers basically ignore most non-targeted display advertising… the traditional method for brand building online, but, search is relevent and targeted, therefore consumers are MUCH MORE aware of the page content than they are on a typicall web page.