As a former advertising agency person I understand how recessions really have an impact on an advertising business as advertising budgets dry up no matter how much we argued that a recession is the best time to advertise.
What’s different about this recession is that it is masking a major shift in the way advertising dollars are being spent and some people are hanging on for the recession to end, not knowing that something else is happening and those local ad dollars aren’t going to come back in the same old way.
I just read another in a long list of articles about what’s really happening to local advertising.
This one is from MediaPost, written by Erik Sass, Cross-Media Loss: Local Ad Revenues Plunge
Here’s his graph and copy:
To me this means that when the recession finally ends we better be ready for a new way of doing retail advertising, newspapers and radio aren’t going to bounce back to 2007 numbers, but the Internet will hit those numbers and much more.
So, if you’re just hanging on until the recession is over thinking life will then return to normal, think again.