Hurrah! UK Marketing sector “not dead yet…”
It´s staggering about a bit though! Today´s Bellwether Q2 2008 report on advertiser´s anticipated marketing spend from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising did little to quell the sense of impending doom now firmly established in many UK marketing services companies. Much to absolutely nobody´s surprise, budgets across almost all categories of marketing spend have been revised down for the third successive quarter. The sharpest drop since 9/11 the report claims.
With the average tenure of a marketing director in a large company being 20 months, even in good times, the prospect of a recession or stagnancy induces paralysis in many marketeers; Is it my customer? Is it one of my agencies? Was it the last campaign? Should I pull the next campaign? Why isn´t research giving me any answers? Where am I gonna work next? Who´d have me? etcetera…
The typical client response in the age of traditional media was pretty simple. Slow spending. As the gears start to slow, the obvious candidates for marketing budget cuts are the big expensive “pay and spray” media channels; TV, press, outdoor, radio and cinema. The problem with these channels has always been their lack of accountability. Measurement tools and methodologies tend to be platform specific, audience samples of varying quality and consistency, and each data silo resists being integrated with other data silos. What gets measured are primarily media outputs rather than audience outcomes.
Sure enough, TV, press, outdoor, radio and cinema suffered the deepest downward adjustment in client budgets since Q1 2006 according to the Bellwether report. What came next was more interesting. Direct Marketing took a heavy hit, with budgets revised down for the fifth year running.
Odd when you consider that DM has for the longest time been one of the most accountable ways of reaching a target group. Not so odd when you scratch at the surface a little and see that what´s really happening in DM is simply a continuation of the long migration out of print based postal campaigns and into email.
PR, events and market research budgets all saw small gains in marketing budgets, reflecting their current position as three marketing channels which can deliver enormous value, particularly in B2B and which should be able to migrate successfully to digital formats. However there remains a huge disparity between the leaders and laggards to the extent that they´ve retooled their businesses for the web.
The truth is that media all over is becoming fuzzy at the edges. In B2C marketing, channels are bleeding into each other via common direct response mechanisms. There are the expected losers that everybody knows about - national newspapers, but there are also unexpected winners - local TV and radio, boosted by advances in geo-targeted marketing analytics.
In B2B it´s all about trusted sources of information. A 2006 survey by Marketing Sherpa & CNET found that the top three most effective marketing tactics to “directly influence a technology or services purchase decision” were all offline, and none of them were vendor-originated (at least not directly).
- Word-of-mouth - 48.3%
- Conferences and trade shows - 41.9%
- Print magazines - 40.6
What this says to me is that PR is overtaking marketing and acting as a kind of currency across a whole range of newly converged channels. Events promote public relations, PR promotes events.
Whilst flaks are very much in their comfort zones turning out an elegant well timed press release, planning a piece of web video tends to be a stretch too far. There´s a skills gap opening up which is as much a chasm as it is an opportunity because the kind of skills traditionally recruited by PR agencies, - basic journalism, account management skills - generally don´t adapt easily to creating, for example, a piece of viral media or a 10 minute in-depth film on the latest controversy in immunology.
Equally, the traditional skills of B2B video producers - mainly technical and logistics skills - doesn´t equip them to create compelling content that meets a brands strategic or tactical communications objectives.
The answer I think is in the rise of new kinds of communications companies (such as ScribeMedia, which is part software development company, part media production company, part new media strategy and consulting firm) which are predicated on providing media solutions that are also interwoven with subject-matter expertise.
How long it will take for this kind of approach to be common is anyone´s guess. It could take a generation, given the current silos that exist in the teaching of media in some parts of Europe and the US.
Hey, that´s an opportunity right?
Russell is Managing Director of ScribeMedia Europe. When not helping customers design and execute new media strategies, Russell can be found rocking out to obscure Russian punk music from the Gorbachev era.
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