A new study suggests that online advertising in Britain will grow by 7 per cent by the end of the year and will eventually outstrip the amount of cash that companies spend on advertising via such traditional media as print and television.

A report by eMarketer, called UK Online Advertising Spending and Trends, discovered that online marketing had been spared the effects of the recession in a way that other kinds of media advertising had not been able to avoid.

Last year, advertisers in the UK spent a total of £3.54 billion on online advertising, which was 5.7 per cent more than in the previous year. Conversely the amount spent on advertising in other more traditional media plunged by 16 per cent.

eMarketer senior analyst Karin Von Abrams, who wrote the report, commented: “Internet ad spending continued to grow during the economic downturn, online marketers are well placed to capitalize on the recovery, whether this is slow and halting, or steady and more rapid.”

She said that the company expects spending on online advertising to level out next year, before rising yet again because of the enormous marketing opportunities presented by the 2012 London Olympics.

The extent to which online marketing has avoided the worst of the recession was underlined in a separate statement by the bosses of WPP and Publicis, both of who told the Cannes Lions advertising festival over the weekend that the advertising market was improving – in contrast to other sectors.

Mr Sorrell said that there are “no signs whatsoever” that European clients were reducing their marketing spending, although levels had yet to return to the peaks of 2008.

Global goods colossus Unilever’s senior vice-president Laura Klauberg stressed the importance of social networking sites such as Facebook in online marketing and advertising last week at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

Delegates from all over the world gathered in the south of France to discuss the changes and challenges facing the industry and were all singing from the same hymn-sheet when it came to the pivotal role of social media over the next decade and beyond.

In previous years, special guests have included the bosses of the Microsoft corporation and search engine giant Google, but this year’s online marketing focus was well and truly on Facebook, with a special appearance for its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Ms Klauberg, who is Unilever’s senior VP for global media, insisted that “social media isn’t just another channel. It’s not just about Facebook, it’s much bigger as it changes the relationship with the consumer, forcing us to change the whole mindset of our business.”

She revealed that her company is increasing its budget for digital advertising by at least 50 this year and said that it is increasingly reliant on online marketing to complement its advertising in more traditional media such as television or print.

Procter & Gamble is another company that is beefing up its social media role. The firm’s chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard told delegates that “the moment I realized the huge potential of social media was when I joined Facebook two years ago.”

With its ability to generate “instant feedback” on brands, services and products, Facebook – along with Twitter – are increasingly being targeted by forward-thinking companies for their unique contribution to advertising and marketing.

Mobile phone internet services firm dotMobi has recently launched a new application designed to help firms who wish to take their online marketing campaigns to mobile handsets.

The app is aimed at small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and helps them to design and create websites that are specifically designed for smaller mobile phone screens. With online marketing – as with all marketing – it is always necessary to grab a user’s attention and hold it.

The goMobi platform helps SMEs to develop sites which are not only mobile-friendly, they also recognise which sort of device is being used to access them and reconfigure their content for the correct format.

The sites will be hosted in the dotMobi cloud to save SMEs the extra expense of hosting additional sites. The company’s chief executive Trey Harvin said that goMobi “connects SMEs to their customers significantly faster because a goMobi site delivers only the content mobile customers need, while making it easy for businesses to set up and maintain a unique mobile website.”

“Since a goMobi website works on all mobile handsets, it ensures a business is available on the complete range of mobiles available, not just iPhones and Android,” he added.

“Site owners can build a site in minutes and then focus on their business, while their mobile website works to bring in new customers.”

Mr Harvin went on to insist that one of the greatest strengths of goMobi was its simplicity and user-friendliness.

Although goMobi is currently only available in the US via name.com, the parent company is planning an international roll-out within the next few weeks. So UK-based businesses that wish to refine their online marketing will not have to wait long.

The social networking phenomenon Facebook has proven to be one of the most remarkable success stories of the modern age, growing from a way for college friends to keep in touch, it now has an unprecedented global reach with over 400 million active users.

The sheer number of Facebook users has also made it a fertile ground for online marketing, with Facebook adverts fast becoming known as an ideal way for businesses to reach the right kind of customer.

This is because Facebook stores many of a user’s personal details, plus a list of their likes and dislikes – making it far easier for online marketing experts to target the right consumers for their products.

Because of this unique new marketing opportunity, there has been a concomitant increase in the number of organisations and publications dedicated to helping businesses reconfigure their online marketing strategies to take maximum advantage of the situation.

A lot of these businesses teach marketing departments or small business owners how to use Facebook features such as the “Like” option, which helps build an internal hierarchy within the website and swiftly shows which ideas, brands or products are popular – and with who.

With extra marketing applications such as Facebook ads in place, and more on the way over the next five years, it looks as if the social networking site will be reaping even greater financial rewards – it already makes more than a billion dollars a year and expects to increase this tenfold by 2015 – and it makes sense for any business committed to online marketing to try and get on board.

Some internet analysts have suggested that the growing popularity of Microsoft search engine Bing could change the way that online marketing operates, as it muscles in on the domination of the search market by Google.

With Bing just over a month old, research by comScore found that, along with the Yahoo! search engine, it was gaining ground on the market leader, with implications for anyone involved in SEO marketing.

Across the USA in May, an incredible 15 billion searches took place. Of these, Google remained at the top, with 63.7 per cent of all searches conducted using its engine. Nevertheless, this was still a smaller percentage than in April – and both Bing and Yahoo! were the ones making up the ground.

Google’s rivals are considering teaming up to better challenge its supremacy. Recently, Microsoft senior vice-president Yusuf Medhi said that his company hopes to have integrated Bing’s search technology into Yahoo’s applications by the end of 2010.

Mr Medhi tolf the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle: “Right now, Yahoo engineers are joining Microsoft and they’re sharing ideas. We will power the algorithm results and the paid search results – Yahoo has flexibility to add things on top.”

Although online marketing companies should not rush to shift their Google-based strategies towards Bing or Yahoo! just yet, it makes sense for anyone involved in SEO to keep an eye on their direction of travel and take Google’s rivals into account.

With the prospect of closer working between Bing and Yahoo! by the end of the year, it would be foolish to discount the chances of a more formal partnership between the two in the near future.