France and Spain saw robust growth in online ad spending during the first half of 2010, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and national Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) organizations in the two countries.

In Spain, online spending reached an estimated €377.4 million ($525.7 million) in H1 2010. This was 20.3% higher than online ad spending in the first six months of 2009, and represented 13% of ad spending in all media. The IAB/PwC figure is almost exactly half the full-year estimate for 2010 produced by eMarketer, suggesting that our view of the market’s potential this year will be borne out.

In France, digital channels are expected to claim 16% of all ad spending in 2010, but that will rise to 21% of total spending in 2014, IAB and PwC predicted. Online ad spending in the first half of 2010 passed €1 billion ($1.4 billion), according to several sources.

Display is enjoying a new lease of life in both France and Spain, according to IAB and PwC.

In Spain, for example, search commanded 52% of online spending in H1 2010, and total outlay on search rose 13.8% compared with H1 2009. But display was found to be growing more rapidly than search, for the first time ever, with spending up more than 28% year-on-year.

Cash-strapped Spanish advertisers typically opted for less expensive display options in early 2010. Embedded formats, including banners and skyscrapers, accounted for 51.3% of online display spending, while just 5.6% of expenditure went to expanding and floating formats.

Video advertising is crucial to rising display budgets throughout Europe, though spending levels and growth rates vary from one country to another. IAB and PwC forecast that rich media and video ads will double their share of French online revenues by 2014. In Spain, spending on video ads was up 100% in a single year. But the video ad market is inevitably much smaller than its counterpart in France, and constituted just 2.7% of online display ad spending in Spain during H1 2010.

New formats such as video encourage new measures of viewer engagement; these, in turn, are prompting marketers to rethink ad payment models. This revision is long overdue, according to PwC analysts. They found that 62.3% of display campaigns in Spain were booked on a CPM basis, while 15.3% used cost-per-acquisition or cost-per-action. Just under 13% ran for a fixed period of time and 7.3% were paid for cost-per-click. These approaches no longer reflect the reality of consumer interaction with digital media, said PwC.

For more information on recent trends in European online ad spending, read the eMarketer report, Western Europe Online Ad Spending: Leading the Recovery (October 2010).

Today kicks off National Hispanic Heritage Month in the US, so we decided to take a look at a few of the trends and tips we’ve seen lately about Hispanic media usage and how marketers can reach them.

eMarketer estimates there are nearly 30 million Hispanic internet users in the US this year. Hispanics are underrepresented online, with less than 60% accessing the internet at least monthly, compared with 76% of non-Hispanic whites and 63.8% of blacks. And according to June 2010 data from the Associated Press and Univision, online Hispanics spend more time with English-language content on the web than with Spanish-language sites and information.

Hispanics were also significantly more likely to report spending no time using the Spanish-language internet, at 53%, vs. just 32% who said they spent no time on English-language sites.

This research falls in line with earlier studies, such as one published in 2009 by Ipsos that found 59% of Hispanic men and 51% of Hispanic women preferred English on the internet. Even 10% of respondents whose primary language was Spanish would rather go online in English, according to that study.

But attitudinal research shows that marketers must still reach out to Hispanics in Spanish. Experian Simmons found in December 2009 that more than two in five Hispanics felt Spanish-language advertising is a sign that companies respect their heritage, and nearly as many said they were more loyal toward companies that show such respect. Spanish-language ads were unsurprisingly more important to Spanish-dominent consumers than to fluent English speakers, but solid percentages of all Hispanics care when marketers make the effort to connect with them through their own language and culture.

That also means Spanish-language marketing content should not appear second best. Unfortunately, however, that is increasingly the case.

As eMarketer senior analyst Lisa Phillips wrote in May, “many of the Spanish-version sites are lagging behind their English counterparts. According to AOL’s Hispanic Cyberstudy, one-quarter of Hispanic Internet users say they could not do all the same things on a Spanish-language site that they could do on the corresponding English-language site.”

Bottom line:

If you are going to offer online content in Spanish, make sure it is as robust as your English-language site. Hispanic internet users are checking out both, making comparisons—and commenting to their online friends and families. Your brand’s image could be tarnished by the very effort you think is helping to reach a wider audience.

The day is coming when Asia-Pacific will surpass North America as the world’s biggest advertising market. According to data published in eMarketer’s new “Global Media Intelligence Report,” which was released in collaboration with Starcom MediaVest Group, the question is not whether Asia will overtake North America in advertising spending; the question is when.

Currently, Asia-Pacific is in second place behind North America in total media ad spending worldwide. Advertisers are expected to spend $135.1 billion in the region in 2010, compared to an estimated $176.6 billion in the North American market.

But growth rates are a different story. The overall advertising market in North America is expected to grow about 2% each year through 2014, when it will reach $190.6 billion overall. Asia-Pacific, on the other hand, will see growth rates between 4% to 8% each year until 2014, when the total media ad market reaches $173 billion in the region.

Currently, North America controls 36.6% of the worldwide advertising market, compared to Asia-Pacific’s 28% share. But North America’s share will decline to an estimated 33.8% of the market by 2014, while Asia-Pacific’s slice will increase to 30.7%. Based on current growth rates, it’s likely that as the Asia-Pacific ad market continues to mature, it will eventually outshine that of North America sometime beyond 2014—most likely, in 2016 or 2017.

At the simplest level, the reasons behind the shift come down to sheer numbers. We’ve written before about the staggering number of mobile phone users in China (850 million in 2010, at last estimate), along with the fact that there will be more mobile internet users in China this year than the entire population of the US.

In addition to mobile users, massive “untapped” populations of internet users in China and India are another reason. China currently has an estimated 518 million active internet users, according to eMarketer estimates, compared to just 63.6 million in India. Combined, these two populations make up the fastest-growing demographic of internet users in the world, pegged by eMarketer to increase to over 1 billion by 2014. Knowing that, it’s no wonder marketers are spending more in Asia-Pacific, though I’m not sure whether we should be heartened or disheartened that, in a few years, we won’t be No. 1 anymore.

The “Global Media Intelligence” report covers six major regions worldwide — including countries in Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, North America, and Latin America — and focuses on digital and traditional media advertising spending trends, demographics, broadband and mobile penetration, media usage, and consumer behavior in each region. It is available exclusively for eMarketer Total Access clients.

Google will report its Q2 earnings this afternoon, and available data suggests that continued revenue gains are in store. After 21% growth for US net advertising revenues in Q1, eMarketer anticipates a 17% gain in Q2.

Those sustained revenue gains reflect Google’s reliance on paid search advertising as the company’s main engine for growth. And a healthy search ad spending market further reflects the slowly recovering ecommerce market, said eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman.

“Google is an indicator of economic trends. Most paid search ads have some commercial intent. Therefore, people clicking on search ads—and thereby monetizing them—indicates a continued increase in search queries with commercial intent,” Hallerman explained.

Furthermore, he noted, Google’s revenue growth also comes from the company’s success at placing the right ad in front of the right individual, and an increased competition for prime keywords, which tends to raise the price for higher positions in search results.

With all that in mind, eMarketer estimates that Google’s net US ad revenues for all of 2010 will grow by nearly 21%—making Google a rare bird among web companies that depend on ad revenues.

eMarketer recently published its first ever worldwide ad spending projections, forecasting double-digit growth in the online space as the global economy continues to improve.

That fast digital growth will be supported by rising spending around the world, with increases coming especially quickly to the developing markets in Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East and Africa.

The outlook for total media spending is also positive, but less so. The advertising market as a whole took a significantly bigger hit during 2009—down 10.5% around the world compared with a small rise of 2% in the online space. By 2014, eMarketer predicts $564 billion in total ad spending around the world.

In addition, its recovery will be slower. Marketers who turned to digital for its effectiveness and measureability in tough times will continue to appreciate those qualities as budgets go up, and with the world’s population spending more and more time with digital media, dollars will follow eyeballs.

Even the gains that overall ad spending will make in coming years will be largely due to spending online, which is included in the total. Traditional media, for the most part, will remain stagnant or in decline.

To purchase the full report, “Worldwide Ad Spending,” click here. Total Access clients, log in and view the report now.