I’ve been on the road during the past week presenting about online advertising trends at our annual client meetings. With the current macroeconomic climate, you can imagine that a few of my slides are pretty grim. Not wanting to be a complete downer, I threw in some interesting tidbits about the presidential election.

The graphic that has consistently drawn a reaction is featured below. Since July, Obama has placed 2.1 billion display impressions online, spread out over more than 200 unique ad creatives and 400 web properties. What’s even more stunning is that he’s out-gunned McCain with 23 times the impressions over that time period.

You’ll also note that Obama’s major online push happened not during the Democratic or Republican conventions, but pretty much just as the stock market imploded and popular sentiment was swinging back toward the Democratic nominee. Interesting timing, to say the least.

Within the whirlwind of negative news regarding the economy and the advertising outlook, I found a significant, welcome trend in the IAB’s recent revenue report covering the first half of this year. I’m scratching my head trying to understand why more hasn’t been made of this, because it portends hugely positive things for the online space.

The IAB recently announced a 15.2% year-over-year growth rate for Internet advertising for the first half of 2008. When you dissect the 15.2% number, some interesting details emerge. Out of nine industries tracked, only four have grown from last year. In and of itself, this finding would fall in line with all of the other negative things we’re hearing about the prospects for advertising.

However, look at the list of the four growth industries: CPG, Auto, Telco and Computing. Do you see what I see? These industries have consistently been the big overall ad spenders for a long, long time. Companies within these four industries make up 42 of the Top 100 national advertisers, and 52% of the advertising spend. And note that the two largest ad-spending industries, i.e. CPG and Auto, have been largely absent from the digital world until very recently. When you combine these four industries, their online ad spending grew 29.8% on a year-over-year basis from the first half of 2007.

The implications of all this? If the big ad spending industries continue to embrace the online medium more aggressively, chances are good that new, significant waves of growth are in the works for the interactive space. In his recent forecast, Jack Myers makes this interesting statement: “We are in the dead center of a two-decade industry transformation that began with the launch of Google in 1998. It will be 2012 before the industry of the future - the 21^st Century model of the media and advertising industry - will begin to prosper.” While new technology trends typically get all the buzz, I have this sneaking suspicion that some of the leading advertisers that make up big ad-spending industries may be out-innovating all of us, and we will see new online market mojo well before 2012.

Several “Connecting the Dots” authors have touched on the economy in recent days. As consumers’ healthcare costs continue to climb, it seems natural that healthcare cannot be immune to the effects of the downturn that has our world reeling. The New York Times on Tuesday published an article about a trend in patients stopping certain medications because they can’t afford them. Other news sources have reported on various patient cost-saving measures, from splitting pills in half to taking a medication every other day instead of every day.

I wondered if we would see evidence of this trend in our own data. Actually, I assumed we would and wondered just how prominent this topic would be in the online discussion we measure. There is definitely discussion of medication and affordability taking place within the blogosphere, with entry titles like “One Pill Left” and “I cannot afford to get sick” and the simple, direct “uggh.”

But what surprised me in looking at the broader trend of this discussion is that there has not been much of an increase in these messages over the past six months, as our BlogPulse data show:

There is a general upward trend in discussion of medication affordability, but it isn’t the steep climb I expected to see - aside from a noticeable peak in discussion during the week ending September 27 (which was the same week that the Dow experienced a 5% drop for the week and President Bush gave a primetime TV address to present his case for his $700 billion economic bailout plan).

To test the theory further, I compared two different sets of results: one that focuses on messages about not being able to afford medication, and another that uses the same search terms but excludes political discussion in the form of any mentions of McCain, Obama, election, politics, the economic bailout, the Medicare gap, etc. Still, the trend holds: the increase in blog posts about medication affordability is slight, not steep, despite the impact of recent changes in the economy.

It may be the case that people are just overwhelmed by concerns about the economy, to the extent that many aren’t talking specifics yet. Blogosphere discussion of “economy” significantly outweighs “healthcare,” as the following data show:

Will the days ahead bring a shift in discussion, with more mentions of medication affordability or specific steps patients take to manage their personal health and economic situation? Only time will tell, but it’s a trend worth watching.

Nielsen Online’s September results for the top social networking sites include some familiar names - Myspace.com continues to lead the pack, followed by Facebook and Classmates.com. What is interesting is that nearly half of the biggest social networking sites are also among the fastest growing - and they are all most popular (when ranked by composition index) among age groups over 25.

Facebook and LinkedIn, although established in the social networking space, clearly still have growth momentum. Unlike MySpace, which indexes highest among visitors 12-17 and maintains a youthful feel, Facebook and LinkedIn are counting on the integration of social networking into visitors’ professional lives. They index highest among those 25-34 and 35-49, respectively. Reunion.com, a site to reconnect with old friends, classmates and colleagues, is most popular among visitors 55-64. This niche site’s strong growth in the past year is yet another indicator that social networking is not limited to the under-30 set. Finally, Tagged.com, which has really taken off since April of this year, indexes highest among 35-49 year olds. This is especially noteworthy since Tagged was originally targeted towards high school students, but has since been opened up to anyone older than 13.

MySpace is still going strong, but what these up-and-coming social networks remind us is that the story here is far from being played out. Many social networks are launched and fail, but with the right combination of reach and function, there is still room for others to ante up.

This week, Brandweek (also owned by The Nielsen Company) published an article on a topic near and dear to my heart. “Why Pharma Fears Social Networking” by Jim Edwards provides a good overview of the challenges and opportunities that Pharmaceutical companies face when thinking about “listening” to consumers in this new era of social media and user-generated content. It includes thoughts from a number of leading pharma PR and advertising agencies, and references research we released in early September. We agree that the prospect of venturing into this territory isn’t easy and that there are considerations unique to the pharma industry that require careful planning and consultation with legal and other regulatory departments. But like Joe Natale, VP, New Media at Johnson & Johnson, we think it will be “well worth it.”