According to the Vertis Communications 2007 Customer Focus Tech Savvy study, twenty-one percent of total adults in 2007 have responded to direct mail advertising in the past month by visiting a sender's Web site. Findings also revealed that older men's responsiveness to direct mail advertising through the Internet has grown the most, with 28 percent of men ages 55-64 indicating this behavior and 15 percent of men 65 and older exhibiting the same pattern

Senior Editor in Charge of Adotas, Sarah Novotny summarizes key future trends in Online advertising as predicted by Dilip DaSilva, Exponential's founder and CEO. Excerpting from the summary, Novotny says there are six key trends identified in this release.

Preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America show that advertising expenditures for newspaper Web sites increased by 21.1 percent to $773 million in the third quarter versus the same period a year ago. This is the fourteenth consecutive quarter of double digit growth for online newspaper advertising since 2004. The continued year-over-year gains have demonstrated the importance of newspaper Web site advertising, which now accounts for 7.1 percent of total newspaper ad spending, compared to 5.4 percent in last year's third quarter.

According to 7,982 consumers who participated in BIGresearch's November Consumer Intentions & Actions Survey, grandparents may buy the grandchildren something other than toys.

According to a new release from Borrell Associates, real estate agents, who initially tried to appease home sellers by advertising more on traditional channels, this year cut their print budgets and pushed more money into the Web. Total ad spending on real estate has declined 3 percent this year, while spending on the online segment has grown 25.8 percent, hitting $2.6 billion. Borrell projects online real estate advertising to grow at 12.4 percent next year while total real estate advertising continues to compress. In three years, says the report, agents and brokers will be spending more ad dollars with online …

With the week focused on shoppers, here's some information about spenders. According to a report by The Conference Board, about 73 million US households now have discretionary (spendable) income, up from about 57 million in 2002. Total discretionary income in the US topped $1.7 trillion in 2006, with the household average at $24,335. Per capita income stood at $9,148.

Following up on a recent Research Brief on the trust placed in word of mouth marketing, a timely release from Nielsen Online provides October's top U.S. social networking sites and blogs, which shows that MySpace.com had 49.5 million unique visitors in October 2007, growing 19 percent over October 2006.

Spending on word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing jumped 35.9% in 2006 to $981.0 million and is expected to top $1 billion in 2007, according to findings of an in-depth analysis of the emerging word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing industry, presented in Las Vegas by PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn.

A recent Maritz Poll found that 37 percent of respondents plan to shop on the day after Thanksgiving, vs. last year's 34 percent who said they would shop on Black Friday. Those who plan to shop on Black Friday say they will spend $790 overall on their holiday purchases, compared to $637 for all shoppers combined.

Since this has been a "Holiday Shoppers" week for Research Briefs, it's interesting to note that the shopping season has gotten off to a slow start according to the National Retail Federation's 2007 Holiday Consumer Intentions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch. The study shows that 71.4% of consumers have less than ten percent of their holiday shopping completed as of November 12th. Young adults 18-24 are the least prepared with 76.2% of them finished with less than ten percent of their shopping.