The signs are pointing toward the end of the recession, but the damage has already been done to the advertising industry: Ad spending in 2009 experienced the sharpest percentage decline since the Great Depression, according to Ad Age.
Ad spending took a cataclysmic 14.7-percent free fall in the first nine months of 2009, and Interpublic Group's Magna estimates that U.S. ad revenue for media firms will be lower in 2015 than in 2000.
Yet with all this doom and gloom, there are high hopes for digital. Online advertising will grow annually over the course of the next five years, albeit only in the high single digits (less than 10 percent annually), according to Magna.
