[Posted by Nate Elliott]

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

I'm pleased to announce that Forrester's five year forecast is now complete and live on Forrester's site. It feels like this has been a long time in coming from my side too! Please see the full report for detailed explanations of the trends affecting overall marketing budgets and the growth of the channel in the forecast.

You may remember we previewed our forecast at Forrester's Marketing Forum at the end of April. If you cross reference this post to the one we posted as follow up to the forum, you will notice that the "% of all advertising spend" has changed. The absolute forecast is still the same, we just changed this calculation to make sure it was done in the same way as in years past. See below for the most recent release:

This research will certainly help marketers plan their channel strategies.

[UPDATE, 8 AUGUST 2012: As much as I appreciate seeing this research continue to circulate online, I'd like to note that these findings are now almost 4 years old, and are almost certainly no longer accurate. Just as you wouldn't rely upon Nielsen ratings from January 2009 to tell you what's popular on TV today, nor can the data below tell you how Google is handling search results today.]

If you're like most interactive marketers, you probably don't think much about search optimizing your online video content. Less than 20% of marketers tell us they insert keywords into the filenames of the videos on their site, and even fewer use more advanced tactics like writing keyword-rich captions and annotations, or creating online video libraries.

But if you're not optimizing your videos, you should start. "Blended search," the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.

Recently, we conducted a little experiment to learn more about how search engines respond to common queries. We created a list of 40 of the most-searched keywords -- pulled from the search engines' own lists of popular and fast-growing search terms, like Google Trends -- and ran those searches on Google in the US and the UK, as well as on MSN UK and Yahoo UK.