The Sales Quarterback

So I stumbled across this article from Techdirt about the 21^st century’s upcoming news readers. I guess I’ve been in an article-reading sort of mood! The article brings up the idea that print media and print advertising are certainly not unchanging beasts, specifically the distribution of news is taking a turn toward digital word of mouth. If you don’t believe them (or me) just take a look at social media sites such as Digg or even YouTube. Certainly you can argue from the perspective of professionalism and suggest that people who subscribe to some of these sites do not fit your target market, but that’s difficult to say when the U.S. Department of National Defense was forced to block YouTube because it was just too popular.

Interestingly enough, some of the Emotecomm team participated in a BtoB webinar which presented some thoughts about corporate advertising budgets. Not surprisingly it tended to agree with our conclusions about where marketing was going to be headed over the next several years. Specifically BtoB noted that the largest cuts in advertising budgets and spending for starting 2008 was, for a large majority, looking at cutting back print, while online advertising had a majority of businesses looking for an increase in spending in the same year. Citing some pretty heavy hitters in the marketing industry, Booz Allen, ANA, Forrester and BtoB themselves, the speakers found that about 85% of B2B, US and international marketers all together are looking at increasing online advertising throughout 2008. The trend can potentially bring online advertising above print advertising within the next three years.

The difficulty presented by findings like these is that they herald change. For any size of organization, that means treading on unfamiliar ground and taking a large amount of resources away from the things that organizations do best. With the threat of a recession hanging over North America, these aren’t resources that many organizations are willing to part with. Certainly this is going to mean a much larger dependence upon B2C and B2B marketing companies for those that want to swim through these changes and tough times, and hopefully it will breed even tighter relationships between organizations. And, if I was leaving a cliff hanger it might go here, perhaps there will be a larger focus on marketing efficiency.

Next week I’ll be taking a look at marketing efficiency and how some big businesses are tracking ROI. If you have any questions about today’s article give us a shout at listen@emotecomm.com.