• Online advertising growth year-over-year for the first quarter was 12.6 percent.
• Other types of media that experienced growth:  TV (2.8 percent), Radio (7.9 percent), Outdoor (6.4 percent), Newspapers (3.1 percent), and Cinema (4.1 percent).  Magazines declined 1.4 percent.
• The Middle East and Africa had big jumps in ad spending, with 35.2 percent and 31.8 percent respectively.

From the article:

Online ad spending continued to grow in the first quarter of 2012, with significant rises across all parts of the globe, according to Nielsen's quarterly global AdView Pulse report. In particular, the Middle East and Africa enjoyed 35.2 percent growth, while Latin America saw a 31.8 percent rise compared to the previous year. Europe has also grown by 12.1 percent.

The report also found that although TV continues to attract a large proportion of advertising dollars, Internet advertising has seen the biggest increase with advertisers spending 12.1 percent more in the first quarter of 2012, than they did in Q1 2011.