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Belt-Tightening Underway At Top Consumer Marketers

  • Ad Age , Monday, July 21, 2008 10:30 AM
A number of blue-chip marketers are making moves to slash marketing spending, or at least apply tougher financial discipline. Managers at analytics firms say the companies also have been actively testing models to project how successfully they can raise prices without losing out to private labels -- and the impact of shifting funds from media advertising to trade promotion and other areas of shopper marketing.

Among them are five major companies that together contribute more than $10 billion to the U.S. ad economy: General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and Nissan.

AT&T -- the country's No. 2 advertiser after P&G -- is meanwhile in a period of transition as CMO Wendy Clark departs, leaving a question mark about how her successor will manage its massive $3.2 billion budget.

Others in the auto industry -- the biggest ad-spending category behind retail in the U.S. -- appear to be following GM's lead as it adjusts to one of the slowest sales years in recent history. Nissan North America, for example, is trimming $100 million from its ad spending this fiscal year that started April 1 to help meet an aggressive profit target set by Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, sources say. The ad dollars reportedly are being moved to the incentives bucket.

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