Credit crunches, mortgage backed securities and online marketing

My friend Andrew, a honcho at Deutsche Bank, who’s been working with mortgage backed securities since the late 80’s, warned me last summer that things were going to get ugly. How right he was. Now that we’re facing a major economic recession, the pundits have started to forecast the decline in advertising and marketing budgets.

Media analyst John Janedis sees total U.S. ad spend slipping to a 0.8 percent growth rate this year and next year. He and others have revised their online spending estimates, and online media outlets have reported this with headlines such as:

Credit Collapse Dampens Prospects for Web Advertising (Clickz, 10/10) or
Online Ads to Take Hit Based on Economic Crisis? (Mediaweek 10/9)

What’s interesting in this is that their revising their growth forecasts downward, so that online advertising is expected to grow 10% and not 15% in one estimate (Wachovia) and 14% not 24% in another (Barclays).

Let’s see: we’re entering into a recession, overall ad spends will remain static, and online will increase between 10%-14%. That sounds like opportunity knocking. Marketers will demand that their spending be more targeted, efficient and results driven. Exactly what online delivers.

So while the economy is pretty scary right now and my 401K is only worth a 301K, it’s time for us online marketers to put our engagement ideas on the table to help our clients over the next year or two. It’s up to us. The money is there; the question is with whom are companies going to spend it.

Brian Eisenberg has a good article about this over at grok.com.

If you’re an interactive or Web firm, now’s the time.

Are You Curious?

As a marketer, do you KNOW? Your business, your customer, how to get results, how to get more? Most of us would say “Yes,” we’re good at what we do and we know a lot, that’s why we’re making the decisions we make.

One thing I’ve realized is that if you know, then there’s no reason to test something out. Think about it: Why should you waste your time testing when you have a pretty good idea of what will work and what won’t?

The reality is that we don’t know a lot more than we do know. The beauty about being curious and testing is that we let our customers help us, make us smarter and guide the decisions.

The Eisenberg brothers are one of the great evangelizers for testing. They have a slew of articles about how to learn about testing and advice for trying it out. One of the better ones here is about the value of learning even when the results are small, “Don’t dismiss the base hits.”

As marketers and especially online marketers, testing needs to be part of our DNA. Since we can get results back quickly online, we need to build testing into all parts of our marketing mix. We need to be curious.

The funny thing is, it works. Check out a case study Marketing Sherpa wrote on a test I did for Unicel.

In Zen, they call this beginner’s mind. Are you brave enough to be curious?