Advertisers will 'de-risk' their spend and experiment less
In other words advertisers will focus their attentions on getting better at what they already do. This will be good for performance-based businesses and established market players. This might mean that new platforms such as video grow more slowly than they would otherwise have done. It will also mean that the brand new dawn of mobile advertising could be delayed (yet again!) It could also mean that where advertisers have failed to make social media work for them, they will start to give up.
Consolidation
The general pressure on agency performance models allied with some more specific issues such as the final departure of Google Best Practise Funding (BPF), is set to really squeeze some agencies. This will be most profound in those businesses that have not already grown to any significant scale or been successful in diversifying their revenue streams yet. Smaller affiliate companies, some search agencies, a few media networks and some smaller digital agencies will feel the most pain from this squeeze and it will result in considerable consolidation. Digital media will be the best media segment to belong to but it won't be immune to the economic storms.
Mobile advertising
With the Apple iphone turning mobile phone surfing into an enjoyable reality this year one might expect that the long expected boom in mobile advertising would arrive. The reality is that this year will be the year of advertisers viewing mobile surfers as an extension of the existing online audience and targeting them through clever placement and revamped creative. It may be time to ditch the idea that mobile is a separate category of advertising at all and treat it as simply a more mobile version of its online parent. Slow progress and no revolution in 2009.
Classified shake-upIt is high time that one of the large U.K. offline classified players started truly punching at their weight in digital. I think that Yell could well be that player in 2009. They have hired a very smart guy in Mark Canon to run their new media business, and with their core local advertisers suffering under the weight of the recession it must surely be an ideal time to re-invent and re-invigorate their online business. Having said that, there are numerous location based services (e.g. qype) emerging that could still steal their lunch.
A bright outlook after the storms
Unlike the last downturn, digital media has a much stronger foothold this time around and many marketing teams have significantly a stronger understanding of how to exploit the medium. As a result digital media will gain significant share of spend during the downturn but this won't be fully evident until the overall advertising investment rises again later in 2010.
Carl White is European CEO of ValueClick.
