Customary as it is to revisit the last 12 months at the end of each December, at this time year I remember writing that I had no desire to look back at 2001. It was a really bad year for online advertising. I also remember writing, “Just wait. This year will be better. It simply has to be.” Please allow me a very relieved and happy “I told you so!”

If the Trent Lott story, which came to a relative conclusion this morning, is something you’ve followed closely for the last few weeks, you probably turned to the Washingtonpost.com site for late-breaking information. The site is not only the first in reporting on political news, today they’re the first in offering some pretty creative ad formats (how’s that for a segue?)

Who said women and men have different holiday shopping habits?

This week is full of headline optimism for 2003. Yesterday, eMarketer released their Media Spend Outlook 2003 report, predicting a 6.3% growth for online media spending next year. Today, DoubleClick chimed in with their Fall 2002 Marketing Spending Index study, which also predicts a rosy 2003 for the online medium - 51% of marketers expect budgets to be about 11% higher next year compared to 2002.

It didn’t take the IAB’s Email Committee long to prove its worth. Today, less than two months after formation, the committee announced an Ethical eMail Guarantee, a set of suggested guidelines for obtaining and use of email lists. The committee hopes that all IAB member companies will incorporate the guidelines into their ordering processes (there’s no reason for them not to), separating responsible marketers from those who continue to abuse the medium.

Did you know that 7.1 million African Americans used the Internet in October 2001? According to comScore, while African Americans' share of the online population is below their share of the total U.S. population, this online audience is already sizeable and destined to become only more significant as broad Internet adoption continues.

According to eMarketer, the web that was once the place to get limitless free content is evolving into a paid access medium, thanks to the downturn in online advertising.

According to the latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the average American work emailer on a typical day spends about a half hour handling email. Not only that, the majority of work emailers receive 10 or fewer emails and send five or fewer.

Contrary to the popular belief of the Internet being a 1-2% medium, some key categories are actually spending more significant portions of their ad budgets online.

I’m trying desperately not to talk about online holiday spending (partly because I haven’t even begun thinking about my shopping yet, and talking about everyone else’s completed shopping lists is making me feel like a real slacker), but consumers broke a major record recently, which is definitely worth a mention here.