According to eMarketer's recent prognosis for online video advertising, the market will take until 2010 to surpass the $1-billion mark, while beyond 2010 huge additional sums will go to online video advertising each succeeding year. The report concludes that more trusted video content to sustain advertising, and more large advertisers seeing enough scale to enter this market in a big way, will support that growth.

According to the e-tailing group's recent Cross-Channel Shopping Study, "buy online for pickup in-store is definitely becoming more a part of stores' culture," according to Lauren Freedman, President. "Customer adoption coupled with growth among key multi-channel merchants embraces cross-channel customer convenience." A primary appeal is free shipping to the store which 96% now offer vs. 92% last year. Merchants that stock products centrally need more time to ship goods to the store. This impacts same day pickup, now available from just 54% of those surveyed vs. 73% last year.

According to a new business travel survey conducted by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE), 36% of the respondents said they'd be spending more on business travel next year, 33% indicated they'd be spending less, and 31% said they'd be spending the same.

According to a new report from The NPD Group, girls age two to 14 are spending more time this year on entertainment-related activities than they did in 2007, with more than half saying they spend more time using CE devices, and playing PC games and video games.

Comments on a part of the Dynamic Logic AdReaction 5 Study, released recently, show that consumers continue to feel that the "appropriate" number of ads that appear over the content of the Web pages they are browsing is two per hour. This number is consistent with the results for the same question asked in previous surveys conducted in 2003 and 2005. A median was used, as opposed to mean, since the distribution curve is asymmetrical.

New consumer research, from Leichtman Research Group, reports that 27% of TV households in the United States have at least one Digital Video Recorder (DVR), and 30% of those households have more than one DVR, and that 87% of DVR owners would recommend their DVR service to a friend. But recorded viewing is not necessarily the priority in DVR households, says the report, since 68% of DVR owners say that they usually watch recorded DVR programs when there is nothing on regularly scheduled TV that they want to watch. Only 6 percent of TV viewing is now time-shifted, either …

Last week's Research Brief about EcoGreen not being the consumers' hot button notwithstanding, a new Kelley Blue Book Marketing Research study finds that sixty-one percent of new-vehicle shoppers say it is important to purchase a vehicle from a brand that is environmentally friendly. Consumers cite Toyota, Honda and Chevrolet as first, second and third for having the most fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles. On average, consumers say they are willing to spend $2,600 more for an environmentally friendly vehicle, says the study.

With the U.S. financial crisis hanging in the balance, the first debate between Barack Obama and John McCain has taken on unusual importance. But, how did this first presidential duel of the 2008 election compare with the most-watched debates of the last half-century? Compare the 57 million who watched Friday night with TV audiences since 1976, as collected by Nielsen Media Research.

The Nielsen Company recently reported that product placements for the first half of 2008 fell by almost 15% on primetime programming for the 11 measured networks on broadcast and cable television. Broadcast television placements grew by almost 12%, while placements on cable television declined by 20%. There were 204,919 brand occurrences on cable and broadcast networks between January and June of this year, according to Nielsen Product Placement Service. The most prevalent placement type on broadcast television was "foreground" which represented 30% of all product placements.

According to a recent study "2008 Search Engines and Politics: A Study of Attitudes and Influence," by Didit and summarized by Marketing Charts, 7% of online voters say they are likely to change their vote before the election, and the types of sites they select for political information after internet searches determine the likelihood of an opinion change. The survey found that online sources are among the top three media choices for election information for 80% of online voters.