February 2009
A survey of the recent iMedia Brand Summit attendees in Florida showed that brand marketers are focusing less on innovation and more on results in these times of a bad economy.
The survey covered more than 100 marketers at the summit and they come from companies such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Coca-Cola, American Express, Kimberly-Clark and other major brands.
Fifty-six per cent of marketers polled said they plan to “heavy up” on more measurable ROI-driven strategies saying “if we can’t prove it’s working we’ll slash it.”
About 35 per cent of the responders said that they have had cutbacks in their marketing strategies, but are planning to stay the course without altering their marketing mix significantly; 9 per cent said they plan to revert to tactics they are most familiar with, slashing the new and least proven strategies, including digital.
Looking forward, brands said in terms of customer usage and marketing dollars, the biggest winners in 2009 will be online video (29 per cent of brands predicting this media channel as the winner), blogs and social media sites (28 per cent), conventional online publishers (21 per cent), email (10 per cent), ad networks (9 per cent) and distributed content (widgets, apps, RSS) in last place with just 3 per cent.
When asked about social media, 48 per cent of brand marketers said they are already moving dollars toward those channels, while 52 per cent said they are personally spending a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others, but not moving any dollars there.
Significantly, 41 per cent of marketers said the primary reason for their companies not spending more on digital forms of marketing and advertising is "dependence on TV, FSI and other traditional measures."
Corporate culture/political considerations, lack of metrics, lack of creative options and "inertia or fear" were the other reasons for holding back, with 21, 19, 11 and 8 per cent respectively picking those options.
Another interesting revelation in the survey was brands' views on collaboration between themselves and their marketing partners.
Forty-seven per cent of marketers said collaboration has improved and 44 per cent said there is lots of talk about collaboration but it is "still business as usual". Interestingly, the same question asked of the vendor and publisher side yielded 55 per cent saying "it's business as usual," 25 per cent seeing an improvement and 19 per cent saying "it's every man for himself" rather than "let's work together."
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