Marketing Speaker Predicts The Rise of the Direct Marketing Era
According to an October 20th, Direct Magazine article by Richard H. Levey, total ad spending dropped to $275 billion from $319 billion. That’s an 11.2% drop in spending, for those keeping score. But direct marketing’s slice of the total ad spending pie got larger this year, increasing from 52.7% of all ad spending to 54.3%.
The Direct Magazine article goes on to say that most ad sales channels will see declines in 2009 from 2008’s.
The notable exceptions are e-mail marketing, search, and the young, “mobile marketing” channel. (The article speculates that, “…even the much-buzzed-about social networking medium is expected to see a falloff in expenditures this year.”)
I’m gratified, both by the timing of the article and the implications of its content. The piece came out about 20 days after I wrote a column suggesting the end of the branding era. (A column that offended some and dismayed many more, I might add.) In my travels as a marketing speaker and advertising speaker, I see two aspects of the statistics that support my hypothesis regarding branding…
First, direct marketing’s piece of the pie was already above 50% of all ad spending and second, direct marketing’s piece of that pie is on the rise.
For most of the recent past, direct response marketing has been the ugly step-sister to brand building. Indeed, as I predicted in the previous column, branding will die a very slow death because so many “creatives” see it as the fun part of marketing. That’s where they get to spend copious amounts of advertising dollars to indulge their desires to be entertainers instead of salespeople.
Trouble is, the available dollars for such indulgences are copious no more. They simply aren’t there. The pleasure of blowing through near-bottomless wells of financial resources in the creation of cute, clever, or even uproariously funny, worldwide location-produced and special effects-laden television ads, which made no offers nor demanded no accountability for results at the bottom line, appears to have passed into the annals of marketing history like the steroid era has in sports. That is to say, it is largely gone, but not entirely, yet. It will raise its ugly head from time to time, for the foreseeable future.
But now “the suits” are finding the stockholders are holding their Cole Haans to the fire. The bottom line is re-emerging as the number one criteria upon which success in marketing is measured.
Long overdue in my humble, but most correct opinion. And I’ll go into it in more detail in my next contribution.
THE BEGINNING…
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Ackerman is a Salt Lake City-based Marketing Speaker, Advertising Speaker, Marketing Coach, Columnist & Author. His new book, How To Market Your Crap When the Economy is in the Toilet, contains 12 vital strategies for unclogging the American economy, one business at a time. For details go to www.marketyourcrap.com.
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