The Center for Media Research republished a recent forecast by the GroupM division of WPP that says the Beijing Olympics and U.S. presidential elections will help offset to slow the erosion of broadcast revenues in 2008. If there was any relief in the GroupM forecast for newspapers I missed it. This international report:

“identified television and the internet as the primary engines of global ad growth with 50 percent and 30 percent, respectively, of additional new investment in 2008 . . . (and) . . .  said spending on marketing services such as sponsorship and public relations is growing at a faster rate than it is for traditional advertising.” (editor’s note: this eMarketer article also suggests that ad buyers are looking for new campaigns and not just the same-old, same-old.)

In other highlights the GroupM report (original version here) also predicted that global Internet ad spending will exceed 10 percent of total expenditures for the first time in 2008 and said that in Sweden, net ads are likely to exceed TV ad spending for the first time — with the U.K. and Denmark poised to follow.

In a separate but related report, a J.P. Morgan analyst suggests price increases for Internet display, or graphical, advertising — a boon for big web publishers like Yahoo.