The year ahead for ... media agencies.(economic condition of Media buying services)

Phil Georgiadis has a feeling that big brands in most sectors will fare the best in 2009. But with the stakes so high, fortune will favour the brave.

The beauty of forecasting in this business is that most of the time people don't bother to look back. The credit crunch was alive and well a year ago and the finest forecasters were, in these very pages, staying broadly optimistic. Twelve months later, it is hard to imagine anyone will predict an end to the gloom.

With no growth in the market, the weaker players will experience a double whammy revenue loss but most will see out the year saved by the commoditisation of media trading. The default planning approach will be: 'A little less but across the same media and a share to everyone in return for a discount.'

In the newspaper market, it's more of the same, declining circulations and a shift in focus online. Agencies are now dealing with Associated Newspapers across both Mail titles and News International across its stable of nationals, and we will wait and see what impact, if any, this has beyond basic space transactions. Radio will swap the promise of Fru Hazlitt for the energy of Stephen Miron, one of the finest commercial brains of the media industry, and he will certainly give it all he has as he attempts to leverage Global Radio's consolidated position in a medium that has lost its way.

Television has started to jettison some of the new stuff with 'red button' interactivity not paying back. Back to basics makes sense to me but the trading mechanics still stifle best use of the medium, so I hope that by the time you are reading this, CRR will have been dropped. TV will continue to suffer in spite of the marked deflation until advertisers take more control of their plans and redefine the investment criteria. There will be a realignment of sales points by the end of the year and ITV's share price will be buoyed by feverish bid speculation Maybe Google will have worked out that it's actually a sound long-term acquisition.

And so to online: a sector unlike other defined media sectors. There is search (and this largely means Google) ... for big brands a sales and distribution technique. Brands and agencies will increasingly question the ROI and work out that the real winners in the search arena are the aggregators. So why pay twice?

Social media will be interrogated by more advertisers. Facebook will need to attract some famous advocates and I don't doubt Blake Chandlee's ability to achieve this ... but he'll have to show a commercial return.