While Australia raises interest rates and Google is actively hiring its AdWords account strategists, global spending on advertising, including online, seems to be taking a dive, as proven by recent research from Nielsen, Interactive Advertising Bureau, and PWC.
With North America and Europe continuing to cut advertising costs, Asia Pacific looks rather cheerful compared to the first half of 2008:
According to Nielsen, the industries most hit by the crisis are automotive, financial, clothing and accessories and durables - basically offering, high-involvement, long buying cycle products - which keep reducing their ad spend. Sectors that have increased their advertising budgets compared to the first half of 2008 are distribution channels, FMCG, and healthcare.
While overall online advertising seems to be decreasing (following the general trend), there is some evidence that spending on the social networking and blogging sites is actually increasing. In the past some (most) social networking sites experienced difficulties in actually making a profit due to the cautious attitude of the advertisers, now it seems like those issues are being solved. Most attractive social networks to advertisers are obviously the most established ones, namely Facebook (1) and MySpace (2).
