William Blair & Company, in collaboration with the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association (CIMA), published the third edition of a semiannual interactive marketing survey that the partnership uses to take the pulse of the industry and relay its practitioners’ expectations for future performance and trends.  The survey targets the more than 600 members of CIMA and includes responses from more than 100 members.

The full report (PDF) is available here.

What follow are highlights from William Blair's e-mail, interspersed with some commentary:

• Online growth of 19% expected in 2007.

Right in line with the last year. With real sophistication only just entering the interactive marketing world, there's a lot of bottom left in this business.

• Online media prices are still rising, up an estimated 7.5% over the past six months.

Growth is marginally slower than this time last year, but no industry could sustain this kind of growth for long. We like to talk about the commoditization of Pay-Per-Click, but where do you think most of this growth is?

My read is that what commoditization there is has occurred on the far left end of the Long Tail. The bulk of the market—all those niche keywords—is largely untapped, mostly because few operators have figured out how to go beyond the standard keyword-search toolset.

• 71% of respondents rated the new Panama user interface as similar to or better than Google’s.

Panama is Yahoo's new sponsored search interface. We attended Yahoo's official training program; see our after-action report.

• 48% indicated that they are likely to increase spending with Yahoo.

Hardly a shock, since average spending is rising at 15% a year, right?

• 16% of respondents characterized Yahoo as the best-positioned portal or search engine, versus 30% last year, while Google was considered best-positioned by 56% of respondents.

...and this is despite Yahoo's having spent a fortune on Panama. My guess is that this drop actually reflects just how terminally fed up the industry was with Yahoo Search Marketing's old Overture interface and the endless delays releasing Panama. Now that Panama's up and running, I expect Yahoo to start catching up quickly.

• Rich media replaced search as the fastest-growing form of online advertising, with 62% of responses, up from 27% just six months ago, while search declined from 34% to 22%.

This is the only data point in this report that I would consider News, with a capital N. One of the long-standing truisms about the internet is that function always trumps form in the long run, mostly because—in the past, anyway—nobody was willing to wait around for a fancy download when he could just grab text and go.

Bandwidth is cheap these days, though, and pretty much everybody of consequence has broadband. This last data point suggests that the production qualities that have always made the difference in off-line media are really starting to take a front seat online.

That's good news for creative agencies, but maybe bad news for small advertisers with great products but shallow pockets. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.