Who is in control of your brand?

Dave

So, my good mate, David Campell decided to sell up and move to Londontown. From everything I’d heard late last year the world was about to explode/implode and big cities were being hit hard. Sydney certainly felt it, with most big advertising agencies having global mandates to free all hires, and even fire people.

That makes David insane really, well, he’s a digital creative director, and proportionallty (considering population differences) he found that there there were 10x as many digital creative director roles in London to Sydney… Weird, I thought London was about to implode?

Emma

Then when another mate Emma Rhys flew through town for a wedding, over a quick coffee I discovered that maybe London would be a better place to be as she’s getting offers left right and centre. She’s a digital producer.

This post was prompted by the following article in B&T’s daily email out.

Source: B&T Today

The economic downturn has led to a 30% cut in marketing budgets and the transfer of marketing dollars from traditional areas to digital, according to Joseph Payne, CEO of global online marketing firm Eloqua.

In Sydney for the Ernst & Young’s CEO Roundtable “Creating and Sustaining Business Growth”, Payne said: “We are seeing a shift of business dollars to online marketing with business purchasing search terms, raw lead sources and technology to generate and manage pipeline leads.” Payne also encouraged companies to focus on bringing in business leads from both sales and marketing.

Marketing Decisions CEO William McNamara, on of Eloqua’s Australian partners, said: “These companies recognise that in times like this you would be a brave chief marketing officer reporting on a new branding initiative to the board rather than describing, via numbers, how many new leads you are qualifying for sales to convert, and how many have indeed converted.”

McNamara added that tough economic times have witnessed a “shift from broad spend on advertising to specific measurable programs that generate leads”.Eloqua is a provider of demand generation applications, while Marketing Decisions is a b2b marketing agency.

This is all great news for people in digital (*waves*) as we’re used to delivering high & short term ROI. But my only concern is that digital may be perceived as only that, a DM channel, not a place for building reputation, loyalty and long term ROI… We will see.

So what does all this mean? Move to London? Become a ‘social media consultant’? Don’t listen to Dave? Start up a new TV channel? I dunno, but there are opportunities where you want to see them.

(PS I’m starting a new job on Monday, I’ll let you know more later. One thing I can say is that I’m looking forward to it.)

This is news to nobody, however, the doom and gloom that the media push out about the drastic financial future is mostly setup to get an audience and sell advertisng. (In my opinion)

Yea, great, whatever, but what do I have to back this up…?

Well in 2008 it wasn’t kept quiet that the automotive industry is dying, and too right, those big metal carbon producing cars are against our Good Australian Morals, right? Well, yea, wait no, 2008 was one of the biggest years in history. According to the FCAI’s (Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries) recent news release.

There was certainly a dip in the last quarter, but based on the first 9 months the Australian automotive sector had sold enough cars for the entire year that the last 3 didn’t matter.

The automotive sector sold over 1,000,000 units which resulted in the second highest sales figures on record… WHAT? So we’re running out of money?

Sure the future might be bleak, but hey, lets look at that… Today one of Australia’s top advertising industry magazines B&T’s second article was a positive one about confident consumers, HOWEVER…

The Australian Centre for Retail Studies (ACRS) revealed there is optimism among
Australians for the year ahead,
…
79% said they are unlikely to buy a car in the next 12 months.

79%? WOW that’s a big percentage, but wait, how often to we buy cars, every year? No, of course not every couple of years, so if 21% of people are buying a car this year that’s pretty good. So sure, the FCAI say they’re predicting 880,000 sales, a 12% drop from all time highs, or on the flip side, a very good year. If anything I think petrol prices would’ve freaked everyone out and encouraged them to use fossil fuel free/efficient transport, like bikes (which had their biggest year ever, and outsold cars in unit numbers!).

Simon Burrett, managing director of The Foundry and chairman of ACRS Advisory Board said: “I don’t buy into the ‘sky is falling, everything is a disaster’ theory. I’m seeing consumer confidence rising and I think the press tends to focus on what’s happening overseas, which has been doom and gloom, but what I’m seeing locally is that customers aren’t buying into it.” Burrett said advertisers should come to market with confident statements: “We need to let customers believe that it’s going to be OK.”

What do you think? Have you noticed a ‘real world’ impact, i.e. friends losing jobs, maybe you’ve lost money in shares, people ranksacked your house or maybe you’re not buying a car?