For a gloomy start to the new work-week, digital marketing and media researcher/analysts eMarketer has an article this morning, detailing a bleak outlook for media around the world that rely on advertising revenues to get by.

eMarketer looked at planned advertising spending, calling the spends “a barometer of economic confidence.” The company has examined at the forecasts and plans of three major worldwide advertising buyers, all of whom “[give] the situation [a] thumbs down:”

• GroupM, a “leading global media investment management operation,” and parent company to WPP media agencies, foresees a 4.4% decline in global ad spending for 2009. The biggest drops in ad spending they see coming in North America, Western Europe, and what they call “Emerging Europe.”
• Aegis’ “digital media solutions” business Carat Insight forecasts an even more grim picture, pegging 2009’s worldwide ad spending decline at 5.8%, with the biggest declines coming from the United States and Central and Eastern Europe.
• Rounding out their dreary outlook, eMarketer cites ZenithOptimedia, the media-buying unit of Publicis, the world’s fourth-largest advertising group.  Zenith has revised their 0.2% decline predictions downward (upward?) to an expected 7% worldwide ad spending decline in 2009, including an even greater expected 11% downturn for magazines, and 10% for radio.

Is it time to panic? Throw in the towel? Retrench and completely rethink revenue streams? A data set from three advertising buyers (even if they are big, with a global reach) is not by any means comprehensive, but their own individual findings and forecasts are well-informed and cause for concern.

A closer look at the grim advertising forecast, though, reveals a great big bright spot. Internet advertising around the world continues to grow, projected to be up 8.6% this year—to reach 12.1% of overall global ad spending. That finding is also borne out by a number of other recent reports, studies, and surveys:

Business Insider reported last week that online advertising is the fastest-growing ad medium in history.

The Internet Advertising Bureau released information in March that indicated that, even as other media falter, Internet advertising revenues grew to a record $23 billion in 2008.

A recent report from Forrester finds that marketers are moving their ad dollars to social media. Even eMarketer had an optimistic report last month about the planned spending increase in social media marketing for “best in class companies worlwide.”

As the ad revenue outlook for traditional media worsens, will online venues continue the trend toward higher advertising revenues? Or will the effects of the overall economic downturn worldwide have ramifications that affect Internet-based media as well?

At the 2009 National Association of Broadcasters Show, Adobe Systems announced today a version of Flash optimized for HD video and rich applications on Internet-connected televisions, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and home media players.

Launch partners include Atlantic Records, Broadcom, Comcast, Disney Interactive Media Group, Intel, Netflix, and The New York Times Company. The Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home is available immediately to OEMs. The first devices with support for the optimized Flash technology are expected to ship in the second half of 2009.

Wavosaur is a free sound editor, audio editor, wav editor software for editing and recording sounds, wav and mp3 files.

Wavosaur supports basic audio editing (cut, copy, paste, etc.), plus has features for creating audio loops, analyzing audio and doing batch processing.Wavosaur supports VST plugins, ASIO driver, multichannel wav files, real time effect processing.

The program has no installer and doesn’t write in the registry. Use it as a free mp3 editor, for mastering, sound design. The Wavosaur freeware audio editor works on Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

If you’ve used Wavosaur, leave a comment with your thoughts.

Download page.

Edison Research today released their annual joint study, with Arbitron, of Americans’ radio consumption habits – and it shows that podcasting continues its steady, unrelenting growth.

According to the report, the podcast audience has grown by 22% since last year, expanding from 18% of all Americans in 2008 to 22% in 2009.

Edison’s study, “The Infinite Dial 2009” (pdf) details how we listen (and, with online video, how we watch) to online radio offerings, including podcasts.

Among the study’s findings:

• Social Networking. Listeners to online radio are more likely to have a profile on a social networking site (like MySpace, Facebook, or even LinkedIn), 54%, than the general population, of whom 34% have a social network presence.
• Internet Video. As you probably expected, Internet video consumption exploded last year, with approximately 69 million, or 27% of people, watching online video sometime in the past week. That figure is up from 18% in 2008.
• Portable Media Players. More than four in ten people (42%) own an iPod, iPhone, or other kind of portable media/mp3 player, and among the 12 – 44 year-old crowd, that percentage jumps to above 50 percent. The “key radio demographic” of 35-to 54-year-olds are becoming more frequent online radio listeners.
• Podcast Audience. Forty-three percent of Americans are aware of podcasts, up from 37% last year. Twenty-two percent of Americans have ever listened to a podcast (up from 18% in 2008), and approximately 27 million (or 11%) have listened to one in the past month (up from 9% last year).

It’s worth noting that Edison’s definition of podcasting is intentionally simplified, to facilitate survey gathering.

Andrew Baron today announced that Joanne Colan was leaving the influential video podcast, after nearly three years with the show:

Today I am so sad to say farewell to Joanne from Rocketboom! Joanne was really, really excellent at what she did here, she will be missed. Keep your eyes open for announcements from Joanne on what’s next for her! And stay tuned for more from Rocketboom…

No announcement has been made regarding who the new host will be, but you might want to keep an eye out for a help wanted ad on Craigslist…..

Anyone who thinks that podcasting is a niche media for geeks should check out what Ira Glass has to say on how podcasts grew This American Life’s audience:

Podcast fan: Have you found that podcasting has changed This American Life?

Ira Glass: Interestingly, it’s pulled in a much younger audience.

The radio audience has stayed the same size – 1.8 million people a week – but now there’s this extra half million people and they’re much much younger than the public radio audience.

Which is fantastic, of course. I know meet lots of people in their teens and twenties at our live events, and some of them aren’t public radio listeners at all. They simply know us as a podcast.

In terms of content this hasn’t changed the show but in terms of reach, it’s really nice.

Glass didn’t lose radio listeners by offering a podcast, he gained half a million listeners that otherwise would not have heard his show.

Glass’s experience with This American Life’s podcasts demonstrates how powerful podcasts can be for reaching people that prefer to consume media on their own schedule.

Pew Internet has released a new report, looking at The Internet’s Role in Campaign 2008.

Based on their survey of 2,254 adults, they suggest that Barack Obama won the 2008 election because he understood new media and captured the attention of social media users:

Obama supporters were generally more engaged in the online political process than online McCain supporters.

Among internet users, Obama voters were more likely to share online political content with others, sign up for updates about the election, donate money to a candidate online, set up political news alerts and sign up online for volunteer activities related to the campaign.

Online Obama voters were also out in front when it came to posting their own original political content online–26% of wired Obama voters did this, compared with 15% of online McCain supporters.

We came to similar conclusions back in November, when we looked at How Barack Obama Beat John McCain With New Media. Pew’s research, though, offers a lot of insight into why the Internet proved to be so important in the 2008 election.

Rocketboom creator Andrew Baron has launched a spinoff project, Rocketboom Tech:

When we were speaking with Intel about some of their objectives and some of our objectives, we realized that we had a lot in common and decided to launch Rocketboom Tech, with their help.

We set this up in a way where our objective at Rocketboom is met with the extra resources and support to get the show up and running, and both of our objectives are met through a collaboration to get people aware of and interested in new technologies while also learning ourselves from the experience. Intel is creating a massive amount of media already (Intel pressroom is www.intel.com/pressroom and Intel YouTube is www.youtube.com/channelintel ) so understanding the Rocketboom process is just one of many branches they can add to their growing tree of knowledge.

Rocketboom Tech is sponsored by Intel, which appears to be very light-handed with the branding.

Baron characterizes the relationship as an “example of smart collaboration”:

Intel is not interested in simply sponsoring or running advertisements on Rocketboom. They are exploring new media themselves and with every relationship, appear to be keeping fresh and on top of the pulse of what is going on.

This looks like a great move by Intel. By supporting a clever tech video podcast, they’re getting their brand in front of a lot of people that make decisions about purchasing and using Intel products. And they’re doing it in a very cost-effective way.

If this is the future of advertising, I like it!

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Domino’s employees Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setze’s videotaped antics in the Domino’s Pizza kitchen – putting boogers on sandwiches, sticking cheese up their noses and wiping their behinds with the sponges that they use to clean up with.

Domino’s quickly had the videos removed from YouTube, fired the employees and posted an official video response (below).

Nevertheless, the company is quickly discovering the danger of your brand having a new media vacuum: when something comes out that show your company in a bad light, it’s going to explode to fill the vacuum.

Business Insider published this chart, which compares the growth of Internet advertising, shown in green, to Broadcast and Cable advertising.

“The growth of Internet advertising through the medium’s first 14 years obliterates the growth of advertising for cable and broadcast television over their first 14 years,” says BI’s Jay Yarow.

We reported earlier in the day that newspapers expect to see their revenue decline 30% in 2009 – and it’s not too hard to connect the dots.

Ad revenue follows people’s attention. As people move their attention to new media and social media, advertising dollars are following.