• Ad Age, Monday, February 16, 2009 10:45 AM

The Association of National Advertisers last week released some pretty scary findings about how hard the marketing industry has been hit by the financial meltdown, as Nina M. Lentini reported, yet the bad news keeps getting worse, Rupal Parekh says, with no one predicting a turnaround anytime soon.

Unilever CEO Paul Polman "rocked" analysts, he writes, by refusing to provide "inappropriate" forecasts. Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble are renegotiating media contracts. Wal-Mart is laying people off, and Anheuser-Busch is eliminating retainers for its agencies. We may even be seeing less stats about how bad things are getting -- after 20 years of steady increases, buyers of research services expect to decrease their 2009 budgets by 9.5%, according to the 2009 Annual Survey of Market Research Professionals.

"This year will be terrible the entire year, and in the second half, many clients will go dark completely or go on hiatus with their agencies," says Jon Bond, co-founder and co-chairman of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners.

Parekh also points out that the price of a share in The New York Times Co. slipped to $3.99 Friday -- less than the cost of a copy of the Sunday paper. Maybe that explains why a respected foreign correspondent for the Dallas Morning News has taken a job managing a strip club while another veteran newspaper reporter buttresses her freelance career folding clothing and sweeping floors as a retail clerk on Tuesdays. 

Now don't we all feel better about having to come to work on this President's Day ?

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