We’re on the tools beat again this morning. Last week we looked at a McKinsey survey of business executives who showed their growing fondness for social networking and, in particular, video sharing. Today, we look a bit deeper into the latter phenomenon to show just how companies are deploying video to position themselves.

Last week we got the latest IAB figures showing a booming digital ad sector, helped by the continued rise of social + mobile + video. Today, a new global digital ad report is out, showing social search is one of the fastest growing segments of online search, which itself is still far and away the largest revenue-generator in digital advertising.

Over the past year we’ve looked at a number of social media marketing initiatives, and a fair number have been in the automotive sector, historically one of the more aggressive industries when it comes to digital marketing. New research by the IAB suggests that all this innovation is beginning to pay off.

Late last month we cited the latest IAB UK statistics to point out that the social media ad spend — the fastest growing in all of digital — last year grew a staggering 200% to top £132 million in Britain. We have some new projections for the U.S. market and the growth in social spending is even greater.

Last week we reported on the two-headed force of social media and online video propelling advertisers in the UK to a record spend for 2010. While we wait for the audited US online ad spend numbers to come out in the coming weeks, here’s further evidence of the importance of online video to the marketing world.

The Internet Advertising Bureau released its latest audit of the U.S. online ad market and – surprise, surprise – it’s more record growth for the sector.

Online advertising continues to set new records, this time in the United States where the digital spend for the first half of 2010 exceeded $12.1 billion, reports the Internet Advertising Bureau. We reported earlier this month that in the UK spending on social media helped propel the total online ad spend. In the US, it was a different catalyst: online video.

The new online ad spend figures are out from IAB UK this morning revealing a recession-busting 10 percent year-on-year rise. More impressively, the online ad spend is nearly one-quarter of the total UK advertising market. Yep, £1 out of every £4 spent on advertising in the UK is now spent online with only one direction to go: UP.

A new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau in shows that Europeans from Portugal to Poland have been steadily embracing social media. Of all internet users surveyed in 16 countries, 52%  had updated or viewed …

It’s something industry observers have anticipated for a while, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau has confirmed with the release of its Q3 report of internet advertising revenues in the US, which shows that while performance …