Dales Bits – February 09

Recession, what recession?

At the end of 2008, we were wondering what the media were on about with this whole recession palaver!

Advertising spends kept coming, planning was strong into 2009 and there seemed to be a quiet confidence that Christmas and New Year sales would save the day.

In many ways, we in agency-land tend to be a little immune to major downtowns as clients still need to keep spending to maintain their momentum and some of the smarter ones increase spends to take advantage of their competitors dropping confidence and good deals in the media marketplace.

There is however one great business danger we can’t counter…international decisions to retrench marketing and advertising business back to Australia or beyond as a cost-saving measure.

We have already seen redundancies from many of the dinosaur global agencies, most with massive overheads, large international management fees and some tremendously expensive staff….it is little wonder that their first sign of recognition of a changing market is panic.

We don’t anticipate this is going to be an easy year by any means, but there are many ways to improve the efficiency and costs of a business without immediately resorting to dropping staff as a way to improve bottom line.

Perhaps some of them could even consider dropping the average case price for their weekly wine consumption!

Being smaller and more nimble, we independent agencies are able to act, not react to the changing market far quicker than many of the big boys.

Having said that we are all going to have to make changes to the way we approach the business of advertising.

Watch this space.

Making the most of a downturn

It’s not only the retailers who are discounting their wares, a recessional market also offers advertisers some positive news with some great discounts and bonuses being offered in the media market.

If you would like to know more about how to stretch your media investment, drop a note to dale@media360.co.nz or john@360interactive.co.nz
Or, you could just give one of us a call.

Let the HD battle commence!

In case you missed Fridays NBR report by Chris Keall, here is a summarised version.

There are now a total of 198,938 Freeview receivers in the country, equating to 12.6% of all homes.

52,522 of these were receivers sold through retailers in TVs that already house the HD version of Freeview’s tuner. The Olympics had a significant increase on sales.

SKY’s HD product has a growth goal to 80,000 by August and a current base of around 50,000 subscribers (less than 10% of the total base of SKY homes).

We still don’t have any audience numbers on these platforms, therefore no significant advertising return for the huge investments that have been made in this space by the networks….but we are watching….and waiting.