eMarketer’s Geoff Ramsey recently discussed the financial meltdown and its predicted impact on traditional and digital media spend in 2009.

He suggests that traditional media channels like newspapers, radio and magazines will see the worst decline with marketers cutting back on spend given its audience fragmentation, the fundamental shift in power from marketers to consumers and an array of technologies enabled by the Internet.

Ramsey claims that TV will not get off lightly; that the cracks will begin to appear in 2009 with most researchers predicting a 5% or greater decline in spend.

“The financial meltdown will force marketers and advertisers to pull-back in overall spend and re-evaluate traditional media which will set in motion a series of permanent changes that will affect how media is planned and measured, as well as the media mix itself” Ramsey claims.

Throughout all this economic shrinkage, eMarketer projects that digital will continue to grow and outperform compared with the declines seen with newspapers, radio, magazines and broadcast television.

One thing we can take from this is that, whilst the economic downturn will continue to have an impact on every sector, digital businesses need to continue to focus on digital’s demonstrable ROI and cost benefit in an effort to buck the trend.