Ingram's November 2022

MEDIA TRENDS AND MARKETING IN AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

advertising jobs have declined relative to marketing jobs, essentially flipping the ratios of people working in those disciplines. For smaller businesses trying to reach the right audience, he said, what was once a primary motivation—the type of media being purchased—has yielded to new factors that drive buying decisions. Those include the high level of marketing expertise on the media platform, a partnership mentality that eschews vendor-buyer models, transparent marketing plans, and a focus on the buyer’s business, not that of the medium involved. Now, with prospects for a rec ession looming, companies are show ing signs of pulling back on their ad spending, he said. And that is a big mistake. Even as consumer confidence plunged during the Great Recession and the pandemic onset—factors that convinced many advertisers to scale back—consumer spending overall con tinued to increase. Failure to reach them, then, ended up costing those advertisers market share. Those mistakes are compounded, he said, when businesses without the right skills attempt to manage their own marketing in the belief that they are saving money. But a more competitive local business envir onment, driven by increasing numbers of new players, is setting the stage for significant disruption in 2023: Novice marketers making critical mistakes in that environment will lose market share to more-skilled marketers. The takeaway. The prospect of a recession is not a signal to retrench your ad spending—it’s the call to action for bigger ad spending, with a sharper focus on reaching the right audience. Gordon Borrell followed his pres- entations by taking a seat for an en lightening roundtable where engaged participqnts addressed challenges, opportunities and effective marketing and advertising practices they see in varied fields like banking, home building, and health-care delivery as advertisers and marketers and as media buyers and planners repre senting advertising and marketing agencies in the group.

What Local Businesses Are Buying

Radio and newspapers remain in the mix, with higher usage thanmany forms of digital media.

Retaining Influence | (Above) According to Gordon Borrell’s research, local businesses will likely continue to buy traditional media, including print, and in some cases will remain more engaged with print than they do with digital media. (Below) Borrell Associates’ surveys of thousands of business executives show that companies seeking to establish or increase market share are often under-estimating the required ad/marketing spend.

HowMuch Should You Spend?

62% Spend less than 2% of gross revenue on advertising. They are typically very small businesses, more likely to be novice marketers, more likely to spend only on social and SEM.

Source: Borrell Associates Inc.

that local businesses spend—and too often misspend—every year in adver tising and marketing functions. Those findings reflect a democrat ization of the media in the Internet age, as individual companies are able to create their own media platforms. That ongoing trend gathered mom entum during the pandemic era, he said, with a near doubling in the numbers of small businesses created during the economic upheaval of the 2020 and 2021 era. For media companies, the down side is that smaller companies, esp ecially in their early stages, are less likely to invest in advertising and

marketing. And existing businesses, he says, are often led by executives who are functionally marketing novices. “Economic woes have curtailed marketing investments,” he said. As a result, companies with strong marketing expertise will hold a stra tegic competitive advantage. An example of that is Walmart, where executives know a few things about effective marketing. The digital presence of the world’s largest retailer has created a platform that draws a bigger monthly audience than CNN. com or The New York Times website. That has had profound implications in the ad/marketing world; since 2002,

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November 2022

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