The economic downturn will clearly hurt the advertising industry, but stewards of the leading digital shops have long maintained that interactive will continue to grow even during tough times. Yet, a recent story in AdWeek suggests that even among digital agencies, economic uncertainty has many executives worried about 2009.

"The scary thing is not knowing when the other shoe drops," Daniel Stein, CEO of EVB, a 75-person shop owned by the Omnicom Group, told AdWeek. "That's why there's so much anxiety out there now."

That fear, it seems, is becoming increasingly more palpable.

Consider this blog post from Matthew DiPietro, a marketing manager at Federated Media, who wrote, "The sheer number and diversity of competing points of view, coupled with the unprecedented nature of the current economic situation, suggest to me that nobody really knows what they're talking about, and that, at best, it's all just educated guesswork." 

But a blog post from Jay Friedman, president of Goodway 2.0, indicates that much of the reporting on the economic crisis' effect on digital advertising is overblown.

Friedman and DiPietro represent just a small handful of industry professionals who have recently written on the economic downturn. While the topic is clearly foremost on the minds of all who are working in interactive, it seems fair to say that the only common denominator is that there are no concrete answers yet on how the downturn will affect digital.