I recently attended Business in Vancouver’s BLUE breakfast panel at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. Panelists included the likes of Lawrie Ferguson, chief marketing office, Coast Capital Savings and Steve Mossop, president Ipsos Reid West, both of whom were very articulate, business and marketing savvy strategic thinkers. I was interested to hear what Vancouver’s top marketers had to say about what companies are doing with their marketing budgets in this era of rapidly changing marketing solutions. The focus was on how traditional media like print, direct mail and broadcast are faring against email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogging.
As a marketer, I wasn’t surprised to learn from research conducted by Ipsos Reid that Internet usage among Canadians has now surpassed TV viewing, and that Marketers are spending less of their precious ad dollars on traditional areas and more (to the tune of >60%) on e-strategies. It was also not surprising to hear that 30% of Canadians now have smartphones (iPhones, Blackberries, etc.); however, I was shocked to find out that those people spend almost 18 hours per week on their smartphone out of which only 46% of their time is spent talking and the remaining 54% is spent surfing the web, reading, engaging in social media activities and playing games, etc.
Comparatively speaking, advertising spend does not follow these usage patterns as closely as one might think. In the example of smartphone usage, ad spend on mobile marketing only accounts for less than 1% of total advertising spend, which is still dominated by Television advertising, followed closely by Internet advertising.
Perhaps, marketers are playing catch up because we haven’t really cracked the code to monetizing some of these emerging consumer trends for it to make commercial sense to re-allocate existing marketing budgets to relatively new and unproven marketing tactics.
Marketing budgets and resources are shrinking, but the number of marketing tactics are rapidly increasing, making our job as effective marketers who spend marketing dollars efficiently, much more difficult.
Where do you plan to spend your marketing dollars in the coming year? Please share your comments in the space below.