Consumer marketing has all the glitz, the big budgets, the fancy ad agencies. But business-to-business advertising in banking supports products that are far more profitable to financial institutions (or at least they were before the credit crisis).

This is why B2B advertising matters. B2B advertising supports the stuff that matters in banking, and it should come as no surprise that banks spent 7.95% less on B2B advertising last year, according to new data released this week by B2B, an industry newsmagazine. In all, banks spent nearly $1 billion on B2B advertising in ’08.

What is striking about the data is that among all the TARPed banks, only Bank of America Corp. spent more on B2B advertising in 2008.

For the sake of comparison, the top 10 financial services advertisers online don’t necessarily include the big B2B banking advertisers: