Schumacher and Wall. Advertising Consulting and Creative.

DTDigital developed a strong campaign to promote ASIMO, Honda’s Humanoid Robot for his Australian ‘Alive and Unplugged’ Tour.  Set in the inner sanctum – a teenager’s bedroom – the interactive website aimed to emphasise ASIMO’s personality and sense of fun while communicating Honda’s technical innovation and reinforcing the brand. ‘Visually interesting’ and ‘engaging’, the site impressed the judges with its high production values and the way in which it successfully met the business objectives of the campaign. Visitors spent an average 8.01 minutes in ASIMO’s room and during the first month of the tour the site received 37,803 unique visits. Show >>>>

THE Super Bowl is one of the biggest events on the advertising calendar, as companies vie to produce the most memorable and innovative ads. The battle for the National Football League’s ultimate prize attracts more viewers than anything else on American television and provides a “symbolic pulse-taking” for the advertising industry every February, says John Frelinghuysen, an analyst at Bain and Company, a consultancy. But this year the patient is in poor health. All the advertising slots for the 2008 Super Bowl had been sold by the end of November 2007, despite the $2.6m price of each. For 2009 the price has risen to $3m, but at least ten slots (out of 67) are still looking for a buyer.

General Motors, which ran 11 ads on Super Bowl Sunday in February 2008, has already said that it will not run any in 2009. America’s two other big carmakers, Ford and Chrysler, are likely to follow suit. Tellingly, Monster.com, an online job-search company, said recently that it was buying a slot. Instead of the usual parade of expensive ads paying tribute to American consumerism, 2009’s Super Bowl will reflect a country in recession and herald a grim year for the advertising industry.

Most forecasts for next year say that ad spending in America will decline by 5% or more. Much depends on the fate of the automotive industry: carmakers and dealers normally spend around $20 billion a year on advertising, but Chrysler and Ford scaled back their expenditure by more than 30% in the first nine months of 2008, and are expected to make further cuts in 2009 as they struggle for survival.

The car industry’s woes will hurt all media, but especially television. Analysts at BMO Capital Markets predict that total spending on television ads will fall by almost 9% next year. Only newspapers, where a decline of 12% is expected, are forecast to fare worse. Carmakers have already shifted some of their advertising spending to the internet, and are likely to go further in 2009. Car ads make up 25% of advertising revenues for local television channels, and carmakers have been among the most consistent buyers of high-priced ads on national television.

So far local stations have been most affected by falling spending on advertising. National stations have been more insulated, because they operate on longer-term contracts with advertisers. But in the new year they will also feel the chill, as companies fail to renew their contracts. Television, which has remained strong as print media have lost advertising dollars and readers to the internet, could enter a slump of its own. “Next on the list is TV stations,” says Anthony Diclemente, a media analyst at Barclays Capital.

Advertising agencies are already suffering as their clients cut spending. For example, Omnicom Group, one of the industry’s giants, depends on car companies for 14% of its revenue in America. It has started laying off workers. And even companies that can still afford to advertise may be less willing to pay for lavish commercials amid economic gloom. Federal Express opted out of the Super Bowl, for example, arguing that it would be insensitive to run a glittering ad. Jeff Goodby, co-founder of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an ad agency in San Francisco, says this anxiety is most widespread among publicly traded companies. “They can’t look like they’re lighting cigars with $100 bills in this environment,” he says…  >>>see article in Economist.

As sure as the sun shines behind the clouds on a rainy day, a major shake-up in the search marketing industry is coming soon. The signals are being sent and received through-out the various sectors of search and online marketing. Change in any marketplace, when it does come, is often swift, brutal and merciless…if you don’t do internet well, you’re as good as gone.

The bottom (and hopefully last) line is simple. A new generation of highly wired consumers is looking at monitors more than they are print or television. The weight of their bulk is fundamentally changing how they and other consumers use the Internet. Though it is, and likely always be, about search, it’s not necessarily about search engines. Like I said to start, a shake-up is coming in the industry and like most shifts it is going to produce interesting results.

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One thing we learned from this years political race, Buy Cable. Until this last campaign for the Presidency of the United States, political and advocacy worlds were significantly behind the private sector in adopting this important new tool in an area where most of the money in politics goes – television advertising.

One estimate from PQM Media estimated that in the commercial advertising world put 4 dollars of advertising dollars on cable for every 5 for traditional broadcast television. This study found the ratio in politics to be 1 dollar on cable for every 18 on broadcast. (check). Given the billions spent in politics every two years on television advertising, this was clearly a problem that needed addressing.

Our research showed that the reason why the commercial world had shifted tens of billions of advertising dollars to cable was simple – more people today watch cable than broadcast, and it offers much more precise demographic and geographic targeting than traditional broadcast television. The latter is particularly important for politics, since geographic targets do not fit neatly into the more than 200 media markets across the country.

So we aggressively advocated to progressives that they should learn more about and experiment with buying more cable as part of any paid media campaign. There was no one cookie cutter solution, and certainly cable is not as easy to buy as we want it to be, but much more consideration needed to be given to this potentially valuable new tool.

We are pleased that our years of coaxing and research had finally been heard and many took our recommendations and shifted much more of their advertising to cable. Another study cited earlier found that the broadcast-cable ad spend ratio in politics went from 18:1 in 2004 to 10:1 in 2006. We know from anecdotal evidence that many groups acted upon our advice and changed their advertising strategies. In some cases the changes impacted millions of dollars of advertising, ensuring a much greater return on the valuable dollars invested in reaching the target audience.

But in this process we learned a lot about not only how to buy cable, but how to buy it smart.

Finally, there is another reason: Television, the preeminent medium of politics, is going through a dramatic transformation. It has been altered significantly by the rise of cable and satellite over the past 20 years. But now it is being radically altered by the movement of video to the internet and mobile phones and the rise of digital video recording devices. The way we move video to people, long dominated by our 20th century broadcast distribution system, is giving way to something much more 21st century in its construct, where traditional broadcast will be just one of many options of how to get video messages to people.

What this means for those of us in politics and advocacy is that as television and video change, we must become used to a period of intense, constant experimentation. Doing things as one did them 2, 5, 10 years ago is not an option. Think about this – in 1986, 90 percent of people watching television were watching live broadcast television. In 2008 it will be about 30 percent. This year, right now, there are tests underway that will allow us to deliver a television ad directly to someone’s set-top box, meaning that one would be able to target video messages to a household, or even person, as we do direct mail, phones and door-to-door campaigns today. Depending on the adoption rate, this one-to-one use of television could actually become an important part of the media environment in this election, but certainly it will be essential no later than 2010.

So buying cable smart is not just about buying cable. It is the first step in learning how to adapt our politics to a new whole new era of political communications no longer dominated by broadcast television.

Why Buy Cable?

A) More People Watch Cable

Simply put, the broadcast audience has dramatically declined as a percentage of the television viewers. At any given time, only one-third of all people watching television in the United States are watching real-time broadcast programming.

Political advertisers must go to where the voters are, and today, that means expanding beyond broadcast and investing heavily in cable. Political advertisers can no longer consider cable advertising a peripheral expenditure and instead must consider cable a key part of the media buying strategy.

B) Cable Allows Advertisers to Target Ads Geographically and Demographically

Political advertisers face a unique advertising challenge. Commercial companies are not restricted by geography: Tide is Tide no matter which Congressional district you live in. But because campaigns want to target very specific areas, broadcast TV is a blunt political instrument. The district you are targeting for a campaign or candidate will often make up only a fraction of any given media market.

Cable can provide advertisers with the ability to focus on specific cable systems within the district or state of interest. Though the cable system lines won’t match up with the state or congressional boundaries exactly, most of the time there will be far less geographic waste with cable than broadcast.

Cable also provides enormous demographic targeting opportunities. Cable networks are targeted heavily towards specific demographic groups, allowing advertisers to follow suit. Whether the target audience is women, men, senior citizens, younger voters, Hispanics, African Americans, or Democratic primary voters, cable is a very effective and efficient voter persuasion tool.

There’s no question that buying cable for local and regional advertising is more difficult and time-intensive than buying broadcast television. There are far more cable than broadcast networks to choose from, not all TV viewers subscribe to cable, there is less inventory (advertising time) available to buy on cable than on broadcast, and there is far less uniformity amongst cable systems in regards to buying practices than there is amongst broadcast stations. However, you don’t have a choice. To reach the voters we need to motivate and persuade, so we must buy cable.

In spite of the billions in ad sales dollars that flowed into the market thanks to the XXIX Olympiad and a fiercely-contested (and protracted) presidential election season, media spend declined 2 percent in the third quarter of 2008, according to a new report issued by TNS Media Intelligence.

In the first nine months of the year, total measured media spend declined 3.7 percent, as steep drops in foreign and domestic automotive commitments erased gains tied to the two major quadrennial events.

Online remained one of the few bright spots, as display spending grew 7 percent versus the first three quarters of 2007. (TNS does not monitor paid search.) Television also showed modest gains in the first three-quarters of 2008, as the medium saw overall spending increase by 2 percent. Syndication led the way with 9 percent growth versus the year-ago period, while national cable was up 3.7 percent and broadcast inched up 3 percent.

Spot TV declined 2.6 percent. From there, the declines were precipitous. Magazines dropped 3.9 percent in the period, with consumer pubs falling 3.8 percent. B-to-B titles suffered a 6.9 percent reduction in ad dollars, while local mags were off by 6.5 percent. Newspapers declined by 10 percent, radio fell 8.8 percent and, after six years of uninterrupted growth, outdoor slipped by 0.5 percent.

“Media ad spending, which began tiptoeing into negative territory in early 2007, has crossed an inflection point in the past six month as the economic downturn has become more widespread,” said Jon Swallen, senior vp, research at TNS Media Intelligence. “Preliminary data from the fourth quarter indicate a further slackening of the overall advertising market. Consumer spending levels…remain a serious concern and will have a strong influence on the depth and duration of the current difficulties facing advertising.”

According to TNS, the top 10 advertisers spent a combined total of $12.8 billion, a 0.2 percent decrease from last year. Six of the top 10 categories reduced their media budgets in the nine-month period, including top-spending P&G, which pared back 5.9 percent to $2.29 billion. Fourth-ranked AT$T showed the biggest pullback, reducing measured spend by 13.7 percent, to $1.45 billion.

Those marketers that increased their spend did so magnanimously. Beleaguered automaker General Motors upped its ad spending by 15.7 percent in the period, to a third-place $1.59 billion. Number-two Verizon grew its ad budget by 12.8 percent to $1.71 billion, as did General Electric, which spent $894 million.

News Corp. also boosted its media spend by a double-digit figure, growing it 10.4 percent to $1.06 billion.

The top 10 categories spent a total of $54.2 billion, down 1 percent from a year ago. Automotive was the top-spending category at $9.63 billion, representing a drop of 12.7 percent, which is proportionately in line with the decline in new vehicle sales. Spending cutbacks were more severe for the domestic segment, which plummeted 18.9 percent to $4.11 billion. Foreign auto was off 7.4 percent in the period ($5.52 billion).

Financial services advertising rebounded modestly in the third quarter after a lackluster first half, and the category closed out the three-quarter period at $6.77 billion, up 0.8 percent. Restaurants demonstrated the greatest increase, spending $4.28 billion, up 6.1 percent year-over-year.

By most indications, the economic outlook for 2009 is bleak.  The housing and mortgage markets have melted down.  Home foreclosures have soared to record highs.  Credit has dried up.  Lenders have been forced out of business.  The big three auto manufacturers are broke. We’re at the highest job loss in 27 years. And financial companies have wracked up billions of dollars worth of losses from bad mortgage investments. It’s not surprising that the people are beginning to panic.   

Consumer confidence is at it’s lowest place in 80 years.  And this is important.  Consumer spending accounts for as much as 70% of all economic activity in the $13 trillion U.S. economy.  High consumer confidence is considered an indication of future growth, while declining confidence is viewed as a warning that economic activity is destined to slow.  

Consumer prices, an inflation barometer, last month fell by the largest amount on records going back 61 years as energy costs posted nearly double the decline of the previous month, the Labor Department reported Tuesday.

Prices fell 1.7 percent, surpassing the previous record decline of 1 percent set in October. It was the largest one-month decline dating to February 1947. Core inflation, excluding food and energy, showed no increase at all in November after a 0.1 percent drop in October.

The overall slide in prices reflects the big drop in energy costs in recent months. After hitting a record at $147 per barrel in mid-July, crude oil has fallen by $100 per barrel since then, pushing down the price of gasoline from a record $4.11 per gallon in July to $1.34 in the most recent Energy Department survey.

The Commerce Department reported that construction of new homes fell in November by 18.9 percent, the biggest drop in a quarter-century. The steep decline pushed construction down to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 625,000 homes, the slowest pace on records dating to 1959.

Only a few months ago, some anticipated that the Fed would start raising interest rates to battle a prolonged surge in energy costs. But since September, the Fed’s focus has switched to trying to prevent the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression from pushing the country into a deeper recession.

 But,  As president Kennedy once reminded us “When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters.  One represents danger while the other represents opportunity.”  It means opportunity for those who are prepared to take advantage and danger for those who aren’t. 

 So what should your company be doing to protect itself?  What should you be doing to prepare?  Bottom line, how do you transform the negative into opportunity and succeed where others fail?   

 Let’s look to the past for insight. 

Since World War II, the United Stated has encountered 10 different recessions.  The last occurred between late 2000 and 2003 triggered by the dotcom melt down and prolonged by the September 11th attacks.  Ten years earlier it was the collapse of the junk bond market that sent the economy into the recession of 1991/1992.  On average recessions last about eight months.  But even as the economy starts to pick up, companies can be slow to recover—making the recession, for many, last much longer. 

 Research also shows that in the run up to these last two recessions, a majority of companies operated with a false sense of security.  During the 1990/1991 recession, only 35% of companies outperformed their industries.  Most were not prepared for the downturn.  The same is true today.  

By one measure, 70% of companies are not fully prepared for an economic slowdown.  Moreover, a survey of 100 US senior executives showed that only a handful of business leaders see an economic downturn as an opportunity that can be turned into a long-term competitive advantage. 

 Advertising often plays a key role in driving a company’s success during bad—as well as good economic times.  Yet without a sound business model, relevant and unique products/services and a core marketing platform (placement, pricing and basic promotion), advertising is a waste of money.  The dotcoms whose collective demise triggered the last recession are proof enough of that.  I’ve identified five ways that companies have historically succeeded during tough economic times:  >>more

Should you cut your advertising dollars in times like these: The news is all around us, we are headed for an economic downturn. Companies all over are tightening their budgets and their first inclination is to cut their marketing budget. Stop! Let me explain to you why more than ever you should consider your marketing spend as an investment and not an expense.

Any marketer will tell you that when you know who are you are marketing to it’s easy to determine where your marketing energy and dollars should be spent. By reading this article you will learn the importance of defining your niche market and what five questions will get you closer to that goal.

Explore the Value of Customer Retention: Do not underestimate the value of customer retention. Learn how you can create customer loyalty and design a marketing and sales plan that creates stickiness among your customers and clients. Customer retention should be one of your biggest investments in your business.

Blog Marketing: 5 Tips to Creating an Effective Blog: Blog marketing works. It’s effective and inexpensive, but how do you create one that is successful in marketing your business? Use these 5 tips to help you create a successful blog that will draw traffic and increase your business visibility.

Nurturing the Relationships That Matter: We all run out of time. We are expected to increase our sales in numbers, but we often sit spinning our wheels wondering how to do so. In today’s economy it’s important to nurture the relationships that matter. That doesn’t mean just nurturing the potential clients that may sign tomorrow, but nurturing every relationship. Learn five tips that will help you in nurturing sales relationships that matter. Which relationships matter? Every single one.