A study of chief marketing officers (CMOs) in the US by marketing and direct services firm Epsilon shows that while traditional marketing and advertising spend is down, partly due to the current economic crisis, digital marketing spend is still strongly on the increase this year.
The results, based on a survey of 175 CMOs, indicated that more than 60% of companies are increasing their spend on digital marketing and advertising this year, while nearly 60% are reducing their overall spend on marketing and advertising.
Other interesting results include:
- Social computing (including word of mouth, social networking sites, viral advertising, etc.) was the most popular emerging channel with 42% of marketing executives expressing interest in adding it to their marketing mix.
- Blogs were the second most popular emerging channel: 35% of marketing executives want to pursue blogs and 19% already use blogs
- Almost one-third of CMOs mentioned Podcasting as an area of interest: 31% are interested in adding Podcasting to their marketing mix and 18% already have.
- Mobile devices also elicited interest: 29% are interested in Mobile Devices (Phones/PDAs) and 22% have added them to their marketing mix.
One thing to note is that the survey was conducted in August, before the US$700 billion Wall Street bailout and all the attendant stock market fall-out occurred. It will be interesting to see what the results would be if the survey was conducted this month.
