Their forecast is that the percentage of all USA advertising spend that will be used online will grow STEADILY from 9% in 2009 to 19% in 2014.

One big winner will be mobile marketing with a prediction that it will grow from a $232M spend in 2008 to $1,274M in 2014 - a compound growth rate of 27% p.a.

There was however even more of a wake-up call for marketers who are social media / networking sceptics.  Forrester forecasts that this ad spend will grow from $455M in 2008 to $3,113M in 2014 - a massive compound growth rate of 34% p.a.

For those marketers would have declared search marketing as dead, Forrester predicts a comforting compound growth rate of 15% p.a. and 17% p.a. for display ads.

Bringing up the rear is email marketing - but during a recession would anyone really sneer at a compound growth rate of 11% p.a.?

Advertising spend goes where the potential customers can be found.  So the message is clear - for the second decade of the 21st century that it going to online and in the mobile airwaves.  Any company that doesn't move more of its advertising online is going to find that its advertising becomes dearer and dearer - as offline newspaper etc try to raise more money from less advertisers - and less and less effective.

And if that wasn't enough, analytics is now becoming so highly featured and so affordable that online / mobile advertising can be fine tuned for maximum return on investment. 

For those of us in the UK, there is no longer a 5 year time lag between USA and ourselves - more like 6 months.  So the above trends are coming our way soon....