Categories: Articles

Where The Marketing Budgets Are Going

"Traditional Marketing Budgets Lose to Interactive." That was the title of the news item from MediaPost‘s Research Brief today.

"According to Forrester Research, reported by Richard H. Levey at Directmag.com, 60% of marketers surveyed will increase their interactive marketing budgets by shifting funds from traditional media. Direct mail was cited by 40% of marketers as being one being cut, outranking newspapers (35%), magazines (28%) and television (12%)."

It has been years since Digital Marketers pontificated that traditional dollars will shift online. Even through the economic downturn, as traditional advertising budgets were being slashed, there seemed to be an increase towards the online channel (or, at worst, it remained stagnant from before the crisis). Still, after all of these years, it begs the question: are Marketers shifting dollars for efficacy or because they feel that they can get more bang for their buck in the online channel? While it could well be a combo of the two, it is becoming increasingly obvious that these Marketers are also realizing that consumers are no longer listening, reading and watching their advertising the way they used to. While it’s equally easy to blame this on the fragmentation of media, it’s also plain to see (just look at the trending topics on Twitter), that it’s not just "the Internet". It’s new media “in general” and this includes newer channels like satellite radio, mobile, widgets, apps and beyond. We also can’t just say, "it’s the Internet," as channels like Twitter, video sharing sites YouTube, etc…), news rating sites (like Digg and Reddit) and even aggregators (Google News and Huffington Post) are all very different types of media when you dig into them.

Social Media and mobile is also on Marketer’s minds:

"Among the interactive channels, the study finds social media and mobile marketing spending expanding between 2009 and 2014, with social media jumping by 34% on a compounded annual basis and mobile marketing increasing by 27%. Social media starts at $716 million in 2009, increasing to $3.11 billion by 2014. Mobile marketing expenditures stand at 319 million this year, and goes to $1.27 billion by 2014."

For more information and two very interesting news items that are tied into this, please check out:

– Interactive Marketing Will Cannibalize Traditional Channels: Forrester.

– CMOs Say Budgets Cut By 20% Or More: Forrester.

Are you curious to see if this is just a short-term adjustment or the long, hard shift towards a new advertising and marketing landscape?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.