Marketing In A Down Market – Forbes.com
Marc Babej, ex-Forbes writer and current NYC marketing consultant and Forbes.com columnist, writes in his current column on marketing tactics in a recession:
“5. Shift media spending to accountable media. Not because they necessarily perform better, but because investment in them can be justified in terms of return on investment. A heavy bias toward accountable spending is the best way to protect marketing budgets from profit-starved CFOs.”
This would bias spends towards search and email marketing — put a hurt on print which would be irrecoverable for some publications with already shaky balance sheets — and see the rise of auction models against remaindered traditional impressions (GoogleTV rushes to mind). It will be interesting to see how the supply of “accountable” media impressions holds. Right now the conventional wisdom shows a glut, so CPM pressure should be low.
Wonder if accountable media can shoulder that load, not in terms of supply, but rather in terms of performance. The author already noted that it doesn’t necessarily perform better, but what if we go a step further and consider the possiblity of both overt and opportunity costs being too high in the medium to long term if accountable media doesn’t achieve attractive ROI ratios on larger scale. Even with nominal preference of accountable media, I can still imagine the inventory only seeing a small, very short-lived contraction (based on news and suggestions like those of the author) as people suspect that the replicable ROI can’t be scaled to enough $$. Then it’s back to sq. one (or, two, rather.) But, I guess, if it’s a matter of hunker-down defense, it may be a way to weather.