The growth in online advertising should not be derailed by any downward move in the US economy, Google executives said yesterday, as they expressed confidence in the search engine's business model's immunity to the broader advertising cycle, reports Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson .

Digital media's share of marketing budgets would continue to rise, said Nikesh Arora, head of the search engine's activities in Europe, as the "imbalance" between where consumers spent their time and where marketers spent their money corrected itself.