NP: Lindsie Reitz, "Infidel"

I had been sitting on this article for a while, mostly because I've been way behind on my interactive marketing reading. Buried in the doom and gloom about year-over-year ad spending was this:

Of the 19 media categories tracked by TNS, 17 registered declines in the first quarter compared with the first quarter of 2008. The sole exceptions were Internet display ads, up 8.2 percent, and national syndicated television, up a scant 0.2 percent.

I haven't looked around for more reporting on this particular TNS report, so I don't know if "Internet display ads" is a catch-all for multiple forms of online ads -- particularly paid search -- or if it's really just what the interactive folks consider to be display.

What pushed me to finally post on this was a quote Julia Angwin reported from Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Allen & Co. media summit in Sun Valley this week:

Online advertising: Display advertising “is something we’re working really hard on,” Mr. Page said. Mr. Schmidt said display advertising “is likely to be the next billion-dollar business at Google.”

Here, there's no ambiguity. This is why Google bought DoubleClick in the first place, but it's still a bit bracing to see Schmidt put a number to Google's expectations for an ad channel everyone keeps trying to leave for dead. It's a factor of ten greater than DoubleClick's 2006 revenues from display, which is the only data point I was able to find quickly, but it's still a pretty good stake in the ground.