Creatalytics by Matthew Burgess

Select clips from a recent AdWeek article:

“Those hoping for a turnaround in the U.S. ad economy next year could be sorely disappointed, according to a new forecast from WPP’s GroupM. What’s worse, the new research predicts that outlays in 2010 will decline even more than they will this year.”

“Global ad spending in measured media is expected to drop 4.4 percent to $425 billion in 2009 compared to 2008 when spending was up 3 percent”

GroupM Futures director and chief forecaster Adam Smith said … “The 2008-2009 period is now a more serious advertising recession in scale, duration and relative to the global economy than the extraordinary 5.1 percent real-terms post-dot-com global advertising correction of 2001,” Smith said.

This article and study were brought to my attention by Tony Brock of thinkLA. Here are my thoughts:

Reduction of budgets will certainly continue throughout 2009.

But an equally dramatic trend will be a substantial shift of budgets from brand campaigns to paid search and SEO work. With the right analytical discipline, SEM in particular can be fine tuned and refined very quickly, giving it the agility to always be optimizing for maximum return on advertising dollars.

Here is a relevent, albeit anectdotal, blog post from Craig Hordlow at Red Bricks Media: http://www.redbricksmedia.com/blogs/craig_seoblog/?p=129

Tony raised the question of what ad agencies are doing or should be doing. In my opinion, they should be working very hard to build and grow SEM and SEO services, with a very serious commitment to analytics.

I can’t say this loudly enough: data-driven marketing is not a trend. It is the new toolset.

And when I talk about a commitment to analytics, I don’t mean as an *alternative* to focusing on creative. Not at all. The two need to meet. Fuel one another. This is what I mean by Creatalytics.

If agencies haven’t embraced the use of data analytics to get a better understanding of what works in creative, then they will be left far behind.

(AdWeek: GroupM Projects Ad Spend Slump Will Last Into 2010)

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Data Driven Marketing by Matthew Burgess