An online survey conducted by AdWeek with users of the social networking site LinkedIn assessed how the current economic situation may impact the role of online marketing. Over 4,300 respondents too part in the survey at the end of March and when asked "How will the economic downturn most affect advertising?", 22% said 'there will be less advertising'. Another 8% said 'advertisers will play it safe' but the majority responded to say that the main effect would be a form of evolution that makes advertising more adaptive to changing conditions.

Within this group, 30% of respondents considered that the economy would lead to "better targeted ads to improve ROI," 23% anticipated that the "shift to online would accelerate" and 15% think "ads will follow traffic to social media." When the responses are broken down by job function, there was a notable gap between people in "marketing" and those in "sales": with the latter being much more likely than the former to choose "better targeted ads to improve ROI" (36% vs. 23%) as the recession's pre-eminent effect on advertising.

A full report on the survey and the breakdown of the results by different categories can be seen on LinkedIn (requires user login).