The suit, filed in a Charlotte federal court, is against a company called Mortech, which provides a technology that LendingTree uses to automate lender offer pricing. LendingTree says it has an exclusive contract with Mortech, but it recently discovered that the company was also working with Google–which LendingTree claims plans to launch a loan aggregation service in late August or early September.

Google declined to comment on the suit. As for its plans in the mortgage business, a spokesman said, “we are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the U.S.”

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It’s no surprise, obviously, that financial advertising has slowed down in the first three quarters of 2008. The surprise is that it’s only been a 10 percent reduction (so far), according to Nielsen.

There are also some interesting breakdowns: Mortgage and loan companies spent 62 percent less (of course). But credit service companies increased their spend by 22 percent, and investment service companies boosted their spend by six percent.

Here’s Nielsen’s list of top 10 financial advertisers (click chart to enlarge): Note that Bank Of America (BAC), one of the comparative winners during the meltdown, has cut its spend by 30 percent so far this year–slightly more than teetering Citigroup’s (C) 26.5 percent cut. Previously left-for-dead ETrade (ETFC), meanwhile, bumped up its spend by 24.5 percent.

Want more unpleasantness? OK. Comes now yet another ad executive to tell you that next year will be very unpleasant for anyone looking to make a living off of advertising revenue.

U.S. advertising spending will drop 5-8 percent next year, says Steve Lanzano, chief operating officer of MPG North America, a unit of French advertising conglomerate Havas SA. Lanzano predicts that sports advertising, long considered one of the most impervious to downturns, will get roughed up as well:

Even television sports, which have become more popular with advertisers since audiences tend to watch the events live rather than recording them, will suffer from the broad pullback in marketing spending, said Lanzano.

Lanzano estimated 9 to 10 percent of spending on broadcast sports comes from financial services and automotive, both industries that have been in turmoil. ‘That’s a lot of money moving out,’ said Lanzano.

‘Because of the hits in the categories that support sports–whether it’s financial or automotive or retail–I think they might take a little more of a hit than they would in other recessionary periods,’ he said.”

OK. Let’s break the glumness up a bit, shall we? If you’re looking for a cheap laugh, head to the Hollywood Reporter’s take on the Nielsen numbers. Then feast your eyes on the unintentional, yet very successful contextual advertising placed to the right of the story (which is where I borrowed the image currently at the top of this story).

WaMu’s failure is historic–the largest bank bust on record. The company’s assets are equivalent to about two-thirds of those held by the 747 insolvent thrift institutions and sold off by the Resolution Trust during the S&L crisis.

With more than 20 percent of global technology spending coming from the financial industry, WaMu’s failure and the collapse of other institutions are certain to have repercussions in tech. “This is game-changing,” Gartner (IT) analyst Joanne Correia said of the economic crisis recently. “People are going to stop new software deployments. They’ll cut in the applications space. In PCs and servers, everyone will stop putting in new hardware.”

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• Lehman Brothers: $2.5 Billion for a Bankruptcy Well Done
• Here’s $39 Billion in Recognition for Your Hard Work on the Forthcoming Financial Crisis
• Weekend at Bernanke’s II
• Weekend at Bernankes

[Image Credit: Ape Lad/Flickr]

The company said it is seeing “strong sales, which have increased for the first eight months of the year over the same period last year.” TWTC also said it “continues to pursue and win” larger and more complex customers with longer sales and installation cycles.

However, TW also said that, as it has previously indicated, it has “experienced pressure on its revenue growth in the first half of the year from disconnects by customers in the mortgage industry and from very small customers, as well as economy-related pressure in its Midwest region.” TW said in the new filing that “these pressures continue.”

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