We've all seen interactive marketing statistics in one form or another, but The New York Times has just published a good article on click fraud that condenses these stats nicely (Marketers Demanding Better Count of Clicks, Oct. 30). Among them:

• Internet marketing has grown 30 percent a year for the last few years.
• Of the $267 billion spent by advertisers in 2005, only 4.7 percent or $12.5 billion went to interactive ads, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
• The top 50 advertisers spent just 3.8 percent of their budgets on online ads--excluding search--in the first half of 2006, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence.
• Proctor & Gamble, the nation’s biggest advertiser last year, spent less than 1 percent of its $4.6 billion ad budget on online ads in 2005. And General Motors, the second-biggest advertiser, spent just 2.5 percent of its $4.35 billion budget online, according to TNS, which does not include search ads in its figures.

As you can see, the future looks bright for interactive marketing (the truly "accountable advertising"), and we've only just scratched the surface of its long-term potential.

This makes me think of the old movie, The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman, and the scene where a seasoned businessman goes up to Hoffman's character and says, "I want to say one word to you. Just one word... Plastics." I think we should all go to our aspiring young friends and say, "Two words, just two words... Internet marketing" <grin>.