Credit Crunch - A blessing in disguise?

Working in Public Relations I am tasked with trying to find positives from seemingly negative situations. However, at the Adify round table lunch at Soho House the other day, I was really happy to sit back and listen to the conversation between leading digital glitterati from enterprise publishers, technology specialists and senior execs from digital agencies.

I was expecting the whispers of recession and credit crunch to put a bit of a downer on the event - everyone knows marketing budgets are the first to be cut when economic belts are tightened. However, the mood was positively buzzing and the conversation flowed as energetically as the wine was poured.

The overiding cause of the positivity was that despite the negativity surrounding the economic climate, the credit crunch could well prove a blessing in disguise for enterprise publishers and digital agencies as they are forced to creatively look for alternative revenue sources and generators. Despite overall ad spend stagnation, digital budgets continue to grow from within, claiming a greater share of the pie. Allied to ever growing audiences online, this is a major potential revenue stream. However, there is a problem - although audiences are growin, so are the number of sites that they visit so you end up with a massively fragmented but potentially very valuable audience.

To counter this - and this is where the whole sidestepping the budget freeze comes in, leading enterprise publishers like The Guardian or Reuters have built vertical ad networks in key content areas, using Adify technology, to tap into the long tail of the internet. From the discussion at the Round Table, it seems we have reached a bit of a tipping point as enterprise publishers are tripping over themselves to build their own networks, concious of this potentially huge revenue stream at an otherwise concerning economic time.

With major advertising trends like this, its important that the digital agencies get on board quickly and recognise how best to plan and buy in the long tail of the internet, because the market is there and there is the opportunity for all to sidestep the worst of the credit crunch - and that's not even a PR agency perspective! 

 

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