It’s no secret most advertisers are reducing their 2009spend. This means choices have to be made on what to cut down on, and what tocut out altogether. We are experiencing a trend in which client s are reducingthe total number of agencies the work with, therefore although their overallspend dips, the “per agency” piece of the pie is growing. There are winners andlosers of course, but fortunately performance focused digital agencies like oursare ending up on the winning side of this more often than not.

Fortunately we have made huge strides in building the marketing services component of our interactive business. Key aspects of this space have always proven to be counter-cyclical to the economy. Unsold inventories, and reduced consumer demand call for real action. These actions, and frankly increased spending usually come in the areas of sales promotion, email marketing, discounting, incentives, sweepstakes, and even liquidation sales. We are incredibly well positioned to support our clients in these areas.

We have all read about the decline of media spending across most mediums. The online space has not gone unaffected this time. If fact we have seen quite a few of our clients reduce their overall media spend. What may be counter intuitive to some given how negative consumer sentiment is that the media we are buying is performing better from an ROI perspective for many of our clients. The dramatic drop in the cost of premium online media, but only a slight decrease in response rate drive this effect.  This means we are buying much more for less on our client’s behalf and they are getting better results, which in turn means they decide to increase their spend. We see this as a very positive indicator of what’s to come.

This is a huge thing for us right now. Clients are asking us to “create media for me” – “we need to do more with less”. We are producing a ton of original branded content to be distributed on the web.  Whether it is short or long form videos, tutorials, demonstrations, or simply branded entertainment for sites like YouTube, or Facebook Apps, and widgets. Clients are much more educated on the power and value of these tactics

Last but not least. We have produced about a dozen  IPhone apps in the last couple of months alone, and a couple of Android initiatives are in the hopper. We see this as a booming opportunity, a completely new market ready to explode.

 Makes me want to dust off that old tag line "Architects for a New Economy" - I think I still have a mug with that on it :)