The future of the advertising industry is anyone's guess at this point. This morning, according to a New York Times story, a "leading media forecaster has reduced his estimate for American
advertising spending in 2001, predicting for the first time a decline for this year from 2000."
It's official. "We are in a genuine advertising recession, and we can expect some radical
belt-tightening and shifting of business plans and strategies," the forecaster said.
That forecaster is Jack Myers, chief economist at Myers Reports in New York. Generally optimistic and
bullish on ad spending, this time around Myers estimated that overall ad spending would fall 1.5% this year from last year.
In December, Myers predicted that this year ad spending would
increase 4.9% from last year, but last month, he trimmed the 2001 forecast by more than half, to an increase of just 2.4%. For next year, he forecasts an increase of a pathetic 0.2%.
This most
recent adjustment, he told the Times, is due the decline in the national economy being "much deeper and of longer duration than we anticipated."
On a lighter note, the latest online
advertising revenue projections from eMarketer (drawn from data by a number of AdRelevance, CMR and Jupiter data) are [not surprisingly] pretty rosy.
eMarketer projects online ad spending
(they don't mention overall ad spending) will grow to $7.6 billion this year - a 7% increase from the $7.1 billion spent in 2000.
Whom should we believe? As shocking as it is, I say it's time
to take off the blinders, call a recession a recession, and deal with it accordingly.