Surfing the news yesterday, I found this sort of amusing: Alongside a Reuters story headlined, “Homosexuality destabilizes society: Vatican paper” there ran a Flash ad for Intel Centrino, the visual grabber of which was a woman sitting on the lap of another woman, who was gazing up at the first woman sorta longingly.

(Click on the ad, and you’re taken to a microsite, the theme of which is “Entertainment in your lap.” Alrighty, then.)

The lead graph of the story read: “The Vatican newspaper said on Tuesday that homosexuality risked ‘destabilizing people and society’, had no social or moral value and could never match the importance of the relationship between a man and a woman.”

“No social or moral value.” Hmmm. No word in the article one way or the other about advertising or marketing value.

Akamai says that yesterday saw a 35% jump in traffic to 100 U.S.-based online retailers.

C|Net says online shopping got “a shot in the arm” yesterday.

Business Week says don’t believe the hype.

Meanwhile, TV Squad blogs about The Colbert Report’s view of the whole thing, noting that yesterday “was a sad day because Cyber Monday has replaced Porno Thursday as the biggest online purchasing day of the year.”

And so it goes.

eMarketer reports that online advertising expenditures in the U.S. reached $3.1 billion in the third-quarter of 2005, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Price Waterhouse Coopers. That breaks the previous record of $2.99 billion in Q2/05, which broke the previous record of $2.8 billion in Q1/05.

In 2004, $9.62 billion was spent in online advertising in the U.S. If Q4/05 simply performs to the average of the rest of the year, that means a year-end total of $11.85 billion for 2005 — a 23% increase over 2004 spending. Not too shabby.

Takeaway for marketers: Some say the banner ad is dead, and in some ways maybe it is, but online marketing as a whole is thriving … and will continue to grow for some time to come.

Here’s a fun diversion for a Sunday afternoon, something to get both sides of your brain working. (Thanks to Robert Loch over at Soflow for the heads up on this one.)

“Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.”
—Zig Ziglar