US Marketing spending continues to struggle

We announced availability of our fourth quarter 2006 report yesterday, titled Marketing 2006: A Make Or Break Fourth Quarter. The press release is up on Yahoo.com for those interested.

In that report, we noted that while marketing budgets for Q4 rose from those of Q3. But we never completely believe budget numbers, so we always ask our executive panel to look back a quarter and tell us how much of those budgets they actually spent. The results were sobering: average marketing spending in Q3 was only 74% of what it was in 2005. That's not good. We further don't expect much improvement when we get the Q4 actual spending numbers, meaning that 2006 will likely be the worst year for marketing spending in the three years we've been collecting data.

Now for the kicker: I claim we can already see the results of low marketing spending. According to the Wall Street Journal today, we're already seeing reports of lower retail sales from the fourth quarter. While there may not be a direct connection, we regularly see declines in sales after declines in marketing spending.

Now, if you're like me, you'll likely be saying, "Hey wait a minute! I see advertising on nearly every Web site I visit! And it's not like I'm getting any less direct mail or spam either. How can marketing spending be declining?"

The answer is pretty easy to explain. It's just supply and demand. Online media like Web sites, podcasts, sponsorships, and community-based marketing have vastly expanded the supply of marketing venues over where the business world was before the Internet. This oversupply has decreased the value of every venue as a marketing tool, since people only have a fixed amount of attention they pay to marketing. Yet, the total number of businesses marketing themselves and their products has not grown nearly as much. So we actually have marketing venue oversupply, which is driving down prices. Said another way, we're suffering through a tyranny of too much marketing and not enough attention.

This is why Blackfriars researches marketing. Done well, marketing can actually help us find what we want and need. Done poorly, it's a complete waste of money. But if companies cut back on marketing spending, we do know one thing: they shouldn't expect their revenues to rise as a result.

Technorati Tags: Marketing spending, Retail sales, Marketing, Blackfriars

2006 Blackfriars Marketing statistics

I've been doing some maintenance getting ready for the new year. In the process, I took a look at our statistics for the year and thought people might find them interesting.

First of all, 2006 was Blackfriars Marketing's most popular year to date. According to the Urchin statistics that Earthlink keeps for us, we had 826,000 visitors during the year, and about 1.6 million pageviews. Much of that is thanks to a few sites that regularly reference our content, such as macsurfer.com and seekingalpha.com. Our biggest month so far was November, 2006, when we had nearly 100,000 visitors in that month alone because of an article I wrote about Apple's iPhone possibly being sold unlocked. Who knew?

As the result of getting more attention from other blogs, Blackfriars Marketing has been climbing up the Technorati ranks, Our official ranking at this point is 19,745, based upon 261 links from 160 blogs. This of course ignores the fact that Technorati right below that notes that we actually have 434 links, but whatever. A year ago, we were excited to break into the top 100,000 sites on Technorati, so that's quite a climb in a year.

And finally, with some trepedation, I note that all of this will change in the new year. We've recently installed our own Mac OS X server at Blackfriars Headquarters, and we will soon be redirecting all our blog content there (and possibly our main Web site too). The reason we put up the server is to get out from under the onerous restrictions of Earthlink's mail system and to be able to run Wordpress as our blogging platform. We're not there yet, but you can expect big changes in the coming weeks and months.

Meanwhile, thanks to everyone for reading. I hope to have lots more and better content in the new year, starting with my trip to MacWorld San Francisco in lieu of CES this year. And if you have suggestions for what you'd like to see more of, please leave them in the comments, and we'll do our best to satisfy your interests.

Technorati Tags: Blackfriars, Blogging, Technorati

Microsoft's Zune advertising just gets weirder

Happy New Year!

And now without further ado.... TechZo has posted what it claims is Microsoft's latest ad for its Zune music player. I wonder if it might be a hoax, since it runs about 45 seconds, which is not a standard length for broadcast TV. I wonder.

But just for fun, I ran it through Blackfriars' advertising review to see how it scores on our 25 criteria for effective ads. It scored 5 out of 100 points. That's not just failing, but failing with an attitude. Impressive.

Just for the record, the only points that the ad received were for the appearance of the logo, and the fact that the ad creates an emotional response, albeit a bizarre one. But there is no question that this is one ad for the record books; I'm not sure I've ever seen one quite this awful.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Advertising review, Blackfriars, Microsoft, Zune