Marketing Forecast from Ad-ology

More B2B marketers are expecting to up their promotional activities in 2011. In addition, these businesses will put lead generation at the top of their marketing priority list for next year. These findings come from a fusionb2b survey that was released last month. The company based its projections on respondents from a survey pool that heavily represented the manufacturing, service, and consulting sectors.

As consumers continue to flock to the Internet for everything from entertainment to education, there’s one old media format that does a respectable job of commanding attention. The local television news broadcasts continue to draw in consumers who seek information about local happenings and the weather. As a result, this media format will continue to draw ad dollars from marketers.

Historically, marketers have turned to cute babies and puppies when creating ads. And as technology has advanced, marketers have been employing newer techniques to grab consumer attention. One currently popular tool is animation. Marketers are finding great benefits when using animation but the format has one big drawback – it doesn’t generate high recall.

Marketers both big and small are rushing to get their ads online. But are consumers really noticing these ads? Probably not, according to the results of a recently published Harris Interactive poll. It’s long been known that consumers ignore ads but it turns out that people are tuning out ads at a higher rate when they encounter them online.

For decades, consumers relied on radio to learn about new music. But new technology and services like YouTube, Pandora, and iPods have changed the economics and nature of the music industry. According to data from Edison Research, radio still plays a role in the lives of younger consumers but industry operators may want to adjust their strategy to stay relevant to consumers and marketers.

With smart phone penetration expected to exceed 50% sometime next year, consumers may be spending more time using mobile online resources. Marketers are closing watching the numbers and many have begun to experiment with mobile ad campaigns. Ad spending in this format reached $416 million in 2009 according to eMarketer. But what about future spend rates? Research shops have issued significantly different projections for this format, going forward to 2014.