Advertising During a Recession or Depression
A recession or what some term a depression encompasses a daunting unique challenge. When the unemployment rate started swinging up to quarter century highs it unleashed a new ugly problem.
In short, people that are on the unemployment line don’t buy anything. Granted they do buy some things, food, electric, generally they continue to pay their phone and internet bills so they can continue to e-mail the market with their resumes… but that is about it.
So when they stop buying, your advertising budget hits the floor within months. We have seen companies that had a ad budget of $100 million shoot down to $2 million when comparing 2008 to 2009.
There isn’t much you can do with $2 million using traditional methods… that would be what… 3-4 full page color ads in a magazine plus your ad agency creative fees… bingo there goes your budget, but $2 million for a SEO / SMO campaign would be mind boggling. You could raise havoc on the market place with a budget like that… in fact… you could raise havoc with a budget 10% of that, a $200,000 dollar ad campaign would be an extensive Social Media campaign.. generally complete with oodles of press leaving you with 1.8 million for a free spending “waste your money” print or TV campaign.
In essence the only valid marketing during this economic disaster is online. It’s the only one that your company could afford and measure. Online doesn’t mean forking over your company credit card to Adwords (though that can be used in some instances). Online advertising means blogs, social media and overall an extensive online PR campaign.
It’s hard work, not high cost, big… big diffrence between the two models. It’s generally the types of campaigns that the holding companies shield themselves from because in their eyes “there’s no money in it” … and that’s because of their mindset isn’t to generate an ROI for you.. it’s to generate an ROI for themselves.
You can’t get 20% over spend if the spend is zero.
A blogging campaign means having educated people work the keyboards… it’s not plugging your credit card into adwords and rolling the dice… it’s something that most likely your ad agency didn’t present to you for 2 main reasons. As noted above it’s that there is no “money” in it for them, and second because honestly they don’t know how to do it… and most likely would outsource it to a company like us to do it.
Amazing flip of events that have taken place over the past year… granted most advertising agencies have the contacts…but we have the ROI for the client… this economy will prove what works the most.