For those who may be wearying of hearing about “green shoots” …well, sorry, but here are a few more; and these are fairly close to home. They were dug up by an Association of National Advertisers study (repeating one done 6 and 12 months ago), and nicely summarized by Jack Loechner as a Research Brief in the MediaPost blog.
For starters, 87% of marketers surveyed are still being pressured to reduce costs; that sounds bad, but this is down from the 93% of 6 months ago and about even with the level of a year ago. OK, so it’s not much; but we did say green shoot, not an entire bush with flowers.
Perhaps more impressive…
- only 39% think their advertising budgets will be further reduced for the balance of this year, versus 49% in the 6-months-ago survey
- there’s a continuing drop in the portion of marketers who say they’re eliminating or delaying new projects: 53% in the most recent survey, versus 58% six months ago and 61% a year ago.
An interesting sidelight revealed by the study concerns these marketers’ forecasting acuity: in January/February 2009, only 49% of marketers thought their advertising budgets would be reduced over the following six months, whereas 62% actually experienced a budget decrease. This may be partially explained by the extraordinary steepness of the economy’s drop, primarily in the November-March period. Many companies already had their 2009 budgets in place when the bottom fell out, so there may have been some belief that those would not be revisited …when of course they were.
All in all, this survey is consistent with most other recently-reported signals, that the worst is probably over; we’ve passed the bottom, and are somewhere in the very early part of the upslope. While that’s certainly good news, no one is suggesting breaking out the champagne or re-instituting Sushi Fridays just yet (except maybe at Google). Few observers are expecting as steep a climb out as the drop was going down; more likely, it will be a long, slow slog. But even so, no one doubts that going up feels a whole lot better than going down.
