Marc Scibelli | Creative Director

We all know ad spending is down in all markets. From newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, overall budgets are shrinking.

In an Epsilon survey of CMOs conducted in September 2008 79% strongly or somewhat agreed that “During an Economic Downturn the Marketing Budget is the First Thing to Get Cut:” I assume they answered this to mean they agreed with it as a fact of life not an effective business tactic.

The increased budget tightening will most certainly force the emphasis on finding media that is more efficient and easily measurable.

The answer in 2009 won’t be “where”, we know the web, but more likely, “why”.

This lead me to an article written almost three years ago by John Hagel regarding the future of marketing.

Mr. Hagel wrote:

We have to continue to ask  “How much effort and cost did I invest in acquiring information about individual customers and how much value have I been able to generate in return, both for the customer and for me?” In this context, lead-times matter; the more quickly a vendor can turn around and deliver tangible value in return for information from a customer, the more quickly and effectively the vendor will be able to build trust and willingness to provide even more information.

No where has this been more obvious than on the web and in more recent terms in social media. We are seeing more and more marketers realizing social media cannot be part of the equation without a reliable metrics.

Mr. Hagel goes on to make a valuable point regarding our clients:

Old habits and old instincts die hard. While there is a broad recognition among marketers that attention scarcity is becoming a big issue, the response has been increasing desperation to get some of that scarce attention. Intrusive ads are appearing in more and more places

The missed opportunity is how to engage the attention of customers at a more fundamental level in ways that create more value for the customers and for the client.

So if the web is so good at doing all these things easily why are we seeing a projected decrease in online ad spend. When it has consistently trended upwards? I believe it comes down to metrics and and answers.

In 2006 when Mr. Hagel wrote his article clients were still slow to engage and enact true digital and social media attemtps, he said:

Clients continue to develop a narrow focus on new, network-enabled marketing tools like blogs, wikis, virtual communities and social networks, treating them like a checklist to be deployed like artillery in a military campaign – “yes, we’ve set up some blogs.” Few of them systematically ask how these tools might be used to increase return on attention for customers. Even fewer ask who else already has deployed these tools and how they might help their customers find and connect to these resources and perhaps where they might participate in existing environments in ways that provide more return on attention.

But now, in 2009, we are most definitely at the stage where clients are now asking these questions and most of the answers we continue to provide are vague at best. Without these answers the economy and tightening budgets are forcing our hand - to explain something we aren’t totally sure works, but know builds over time.

Clearly the need to quantify and measure all digital media including social should be at the top of our lists this year. Anyone want to tell me where and how?

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