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2009 Advertising and Marketing |
2009 Small Business Development Focus Areas - Unemployment predicted to top 9%, bailouts, stock market indicates stagnant econmy "for sure".
Marketers will be cutting back on advertising spending this year. Industry pundits, media firms, Wall Street analysts and financial bloggers are predicting smaller budgets across the board. A look at the latest projections for total US ad spending growth in 2009 reveals a consistently downward trend, and that’s after negative growth in both 2007 and 2008.
Traditional media, newspapers, radio and magazines will see the worst declines. It's clear that ad buying, measurements and reporting systems of traditional media are being systematically rewired for the digital age. Stay tuned to 2009 TV advertising and radio advertising declines.
Advertisers are pulling back marketing dollars while reviewing traditional media. Media planning and dollar allocation will see changes for 2010.
While the economy is shrinking, the Internet will continue to grow, though at a far more constrained pace. e-Marketer projects online ad spending will rise 8.9% in 2009, after an already ratcheted down rate of 11.3% in 2008 which is much lower than the 2007 +25% growth.
eMarketer’s 2009 growth estimate of nearly 9% is relatively conservative; projections from many researchers, analysts and media shops are far more bullish.
With online, some ad formats will fare better than others. Marketers will continue to use search and e-mail heavily this year, because of both their familiarity and ease of measurement. eMarketer estimates growth of nearly 15% for search and 3.5% for e-mail. Growth for online video, a nascent but hot area, will be even steeper, though it will slow from 81% in 2008 to 45% in 2009.
Online marketing will ride out the storm, expect to see a growing contingent of bearish forecasters disparaging its prospects. Ironically, many of these doom-mongers will hail from the Internet space.
Growth in online display advertising will lag but only in terms of absolute-dollar spending, and the effects will be temporary. While eMarketer predicts display ad dollars will grow by a relatively anemic 6.6% in 2009, behind the scenes there will be much innovation as the industry figures out how to creatively deploy, integrate and measure the value of display ads for branding purposes. New data is providing solid evidence for what we already intuitively knew, but couldn’t before measure: When display ads are combined with search, marketers can expect a significant increase in sales conversions, whether those take place online or offline. And beyond conversions, display advertising can boost brand awareness, purchase intent and the likelihood of a person to visit a Website or take other actions that indicate engagement with a brand.
comScore, for one, has released study results showing conclusively that the combination of search and display ads leads to a greater sales lift. Specifically, search and display ads together produced a 119% sales conversion increase, versus 82% for search alone and 16% for display alone.
E-commerce will see growth slip even further, from 7.2% in 2008 to a measly 4.1% in 2009. There likely won’t be a decline in the number of online buyers, but a decrease in their average annual spending. Look for aggressive digital coupons. According to comScore, coupons were the fastest-growing Website category in November 2008. Unique visitors to coupon sites were up 32% over October 2008. A Packaged Facts study found that 87% of consumers now prefer to shop at retailers that offer coupons, and 89% said they’re more likely to use coupons in a recession. Expect mobile to get in on the digital coupon craze, too, as consumers seek deals on their phone right at the point of purchase. |
