The American Association of Advertising Agencies are (currently) holding their annual media conference in New Orleans.This Blog comes to you live from deep inside the Grand Ballroom of the downtown Hilton while listening to a panel on entitled: “New Business Models and monetization of Marketing Service Agency Ideas and Work” followed directly by a focus group called “Conference Panel Title Names and How to Make Them Less Verbose.” 

Apparently, for some odd reason, marketers are spending less on advertising. 77% of marketers claim that they are facing drastically reduced advertising budgets for the 2009-2010 fiscal year. Overall ad spending is projected to fall 10-12% from the previous year, which had already seen an 8% decline. 

Ok, so all of this to say that marketing in tough time is, well, tough. That said, there is a silver lining. 75% of these same marketers say that they will shift large portions of their shrunken budgets away from traditional media over to digital. 

Digital media campaigns, despite success stories, are often still an after thought for most marketers. Those that do think about it often only turn to digital after the rest of the budget has been allocated to traditional mediums. 

Of course, there are valid reasons for this which we can document in great detail but the prime factor seems to be a lack of understanding of ROI. Online is somewhat unchartered territory for many marketers so they do not have historical relevance to fall back on, therefore nothing to compare results with. This leads many marketers to fear taking “the risk” of venturing into the online waters. Here be Monsters. 

Even those that may be able to justify this risk and put their toe in the water often this lack of experience manifests itself in a lack of understand what their measurement for success is… in other words they lack an overall strategy. 

So back to the silver lining. Why is this bad economy and shift in budgets a good thing? Well, marketers who are shifting budgets online because budget constraints have basically forced them to will now begin to dip toes, feet, perhaps even entire limbs into the digital waters and begin to build a historical precedence. They will start to understand what they can and need to achieve online which will in turn aid them as they build Interactive Strategies which they can in turn measure. 

Armed with this new found knowledge of digital strategy, marketers will only be stronger for the day the economy does take a turn away from the ICU and they will then have a new weapon in their arsenal.