• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 18, 2011

Online media buyers expect their budgets to expand 11% during 2011, according to a survey conducted by the equities research team at Deutsche Bank. The survey, which was conducted recently among 31 media buyers representing more than $5 billion in annual online ad spending, indicated that budgets should continue to expand at "double digits over the foreseeable future" for both paid search and display ads, and that other emerging digital media platforms such as mobile, social and group buying communities should also "ramp nicely" supporting the overall growth of digital media advertising budgets.

The Deutsche team, led by lead Internet analyst Jeetil Patel, said the outlook should hold at least through 2015, and that based on the outlook it is recommending four Internet stocks to investors: Google, InterActiveCorp, comScore and MediaMind.

"As has been the theme over the past few years, online advertising would continue to grow, gaining share from traditional media," the analysts said in the report sent to investors late Monday. Noting that traditional print media appears to be "most vulnerable" from the reallocation of advertising budgets to online and digital media, the Deutsche team projected that mobile advertising would likely become a "billion dollar segment" in 2011, more than doubling its 2010 base.

"Advertisers are increasingly dedicating separate budgets for mobile, indicating that mobile ad spend is slowly moving out of the 'experimentation' phase," the analysts said.

"Online media buyers are keeping tabs on new themes within online advertising such as radio, social, mobile and group buying," they continued. "As these new business strategies flourish online, it does appear that online advertising growth would remain robust for the foreseeable future. While currently a limited number of players (ad networks and publishers) have the critical mass with these emerging ad formats, we do anticipate these categories to evolve into much bigger opportunities, likely expediting the share gains from offline ad spending. Just as important, online data analytics remains an important area of focus for media buyers in their daily online toolset."