• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, November 5, 2008

Spending on emerging media such as social networking sites, digital out-of-home and mobile is likely to contract next year as marketers tighten ad budgets because of the worsening economy, a group of agency and brand executives said Wednesday.

"09 is not the year for testing," warned Donna Speciale, president of investment and activation at MediaVest USA, speaking on a panel at ad:tech New York on media planning and buying in the digital era. "Brands want to stick with areas that are tried and true."

Quentin George, president, global digital strategy and marketing innovation at Universal-McCann, agreed that marketers are likely to be less adventurous in exploring newer platforms in the midst of a severe downturn. Even if funding for more experimental campaigns doesn't completely dry up, projects will take longer to complete. "A cool idea that might have taken two months to complete might now take six or nine months," he said.

The grim outlook for ad spending into next year is bad news for much-hyped categories such as mobile and digital out-of-home advertising. "With the economy the way it is, (mobile) is one of the least areas clients are going to be looking at because it's more of a test-and-learn situation," Speciale said.

Bob Thacker, senior vice president of advertising and marketing for OfficeMax, compared mobile to soccer: "It's popular in the rest of the world, but we haven't learned how to play it yet." From a media-buying perspective, Matt Spiegel, CEO of Digital Omnicom Media Group Digital, added that mobile is "just complex to buy at scale." Couple that complexity with more austere budgets and mobile becomes even less desirable as an ad option.

What would encourage marketers to spend more on social media and other newer platforms? More uniform audience and engagement metrics. "What we don't have is a consistent metric," Speciale said. "We need to have something clients can feel comfortable with so that if I take budget out of TV (spending), I can show value for it. That's where the disconnect is."

Spiegel said the lack of consistent measurement is not going to change until agencies and advertisers can get the same results from key Web ratings services such as Nielsen, comScore and Quantcast.

George argued that a lack of standard metrics should not hold back marketers that are pushing into social media at this early stage. "We know consumers are there, we know what behavior is there, and the more we capitalize on the opportunity, the more money will flow," he said.

Speciale also took issue with the inference of moderator and BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine's question that spending should be higher on emerging media. Assuming that about 2% of marketer budgets are earmarked for that category, she said, "I don't think the money in digital is bad." She explained that clients had rushed into digital because they were afraid of getting left behind, as they may have in the past with the advent of cable TV.

"Now everyone is taking a step back and saying, 'let me look at the overall picture here," she said.

Not everyone is planning to do away with experimentation. OfficeMax's Thacker said leaner times can also drive greater innovation. With the office supply chain reducing its marketing spend in the last few years, "it really focused us early on to take radical steps. It allowed us to experiment," he said.

A product of that testing was OfficeMax's wildly popular "Elf Yourself" viral campaign launched in 2006 that let consumers send messages of themselves as singing and dancing elves. Thacker said the Elf Yourself site was one of 20 promotional sites the agency Toy had created for OfficeMax. "We threw out 20 sites at once, and one of them went into the stratosphere," he said.

So what will the 2008 edition of Elf Yourself bring? "This year, we're going to be selling elves," said Thacker, without offering further detail. "Stay tuned."