While advertisers are pulling back on their media spending during the recession and continue shifting more dollars to digital, many will also invest in cross-platform content that showcases or compliments their branded goods and services. That could impact next sprint's upfront, since the long-term goal is hyper-targeting consumers.

There are seven categorical reasons why the broadcast television networks, and eventually their cable counterparts, will not survive with traditional business models. Formidable trends vexing industry executives and nipping at their revenues and earnings could collectively have an explosive impact in 2009.

The ongoing economic mess will topple Google from Mount Olympus this week. The Internet giant will be held more accountable to Wall Street and Madison Avenue for what it does and claims to deliver. It will attest to some of the growing pains afflicting the evolving online display, search and video advertising markets. And it will have to think more pragmatically without hyper-growth.

There will be no bailout for media and Internet companies scrambling to survive the intensifying collapse of consumer spending and reduction in ad dollars stretching into 2009. But they will have to respond, smartly, to growing industry-specific pressures.

MySpace unveiled its MyAds initiative. This do-it-yourself advertising on a relative shoestring, from start to finish, could be significant on several fronts by bringing viral marketing to the mainstream. It's all about transitional advertising.

How companies respond to unrelievedly bad economics over the next year will separate the winners from the losers. The first indications will come in troubled third-quarter earnings calls amid lower forecasts on a dramatic pullback by advertisers and consumers, and sobering admissions that it's all going to get worse before it gets better.

Although the CBS TV Network generated the top revenues with the largest group of commercial-owned stations in 2007, its television studio, syndication business and TV library will rise and fall on its future TV network fortunes. Deteriorating economics could hit CBS on both ends of its media spectrum, leaving it nowhere to run.

The wheels will come off the advertising wagon even for national network television in 2009 unless advertisers, agencies and media companies connect with beleaguered consumers. The continued shift of dollars to the Internet and digital mobile, while imperative, is no panacea for the spending pullback on Main Street and Madison Avenue.

The sale of AOL to Yahoo depends on how badly Time Warner wants to sell the search engine and on what terms. A stock-based deal between AOL and Yahoo would only make sense for Yahoo shareholders at the company's own 6.5-times earnings multiple, or not more than $3.4 billion.

The ongoing financial turmoil provides the first opportunity to examine the correlation between e-commerce, general retail and ad trends. Smart advertisers will use this time to study the segments and trends of Internet shoppers to make more of their online ad dollars.