Marketing Pilgrim

A new Forrester report (Marketing Budgets Suffer Significant Cuts) suggests 71% of CMOs have seen their marketing budgets reduced–of those, 51% saw a reduction of at least 20%!

It’s enough to send any marketer running for the hills, but really it’s only those knee-deep in old school channels that need to worry. As the chart below indicates, online advertising, email marketing, and social media are the least hit, with TV, print and radio seeing a whopping 67% decrease!

Scratching below the surface, we see even more good news for new media marketers. While 7% of CMOs plan to spend less on social media, 47% plan on increasing their spend in this area! The same goes for web site development, online advertising, and email marketing–all seeing more budget increases than decreases.

The demographic has shifted dramatically over at Facebook and that change could lead to billions in revenue, according to one prominent board member.

iStrategyLabs spent the last six months collecting user demographic data and discovered the number of users over the age of 55 soared from 1 million to nearly 6 million. During the same 6 month period, high school and college users dropped by as much as 22%!

Here’s the breakdown:

At the same time Facebook continues to gray, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen–a Facebook board member–suggests the social network could realize revenue of $1 billion if it would only push harder with its advertising.

Back in March, Twitter gave us all a head-fake when they started posting “sponsored definitions,” definitions in a the sidebar of Twitter homepages that looked like ads. Twitter was quick to correct the assumption that they were, in fact, ads—they were only definitions, just like you get free from dictionaries.

Then, the boxes began carrying info on Twitter apps. Rather than paying for their placement, the featured apps were actually approached by Twitter. The apps being advertised didn’t pay to get there, so despite the fact that they were still called “sponsored definitions,” they weren’t ads. Nope, no way, nuh uh.

Well, now they are, apparently. Read Write Web reports that two of the “sponsored definitions,” for Cinema Tweets and the infamous ExecTweets, are really ads this time.

You’ve probably seen the “Make Money on Google” ads floating around the Internet these days. (Or maybe not. . . .) The banner ads are one thing (I think most of us know to take them with a grain of salt). But when you see the same scam advertised on Google, even intelligent users might begin to wonder if there’s an association between the two—maybe it’s true.

(Don’t worry, you didn’t miss out. It is a scam.)

Screencap by Barry Schwartz

Though these ads have been appearing for months, Google has finally started to crack down on them. According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google is banning ads with keywords that look related to these AdWords scams. They’re also taking action against the account owners, according to an email to an advertiser posted Google AdWords Help thread:

Online ad spending is not resilient. That would be the wrong description since it has not really needed to come back from anything yet. Even in this economy that continues to keep many mired in the muck, online spending is going up in ’09 and thru 2011. Sounds like a guarantee, right? Well, of course it’s not, it’s just the latest release of research that you get to play the online version of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Actually there is little doubt that the online advertising industry is still growing. The wildcard in any of these prognostications is the amount and for how long. MediaPost reports on research conducted by Publicis’ ZenithOptimedia Group.

The agency estimates that Internet ad spending will expand 10.1% in 2009, an increase of more than 1.5 percentage points over its last forecast in April.

Not so much as a security alert–but certainly a reminder of how easy it is for any of us to post something to Facebook that could come back to haunt us–news broke over the weekend that the wife of Britain’s top spy posted far too much info on the social networking site.

The spouse of new MI6 top dog Sir John Sawers apparently posted all kinds of sensitive information to Facebook, causing a the British tabloids to lick their chops and politicians to posture.

Lady Sawers had put virtually no restrictions on her account, making it visible to the estimated 4 million on the open-access ‘London’ network, and potentially 200 million more worldwide…Lady Sawers disclosed many personal details, including the location of the London flat used by the couple and other details of their three children and of Sir John’s parents.