Marketing Forecast from Ad-ology

Marketers continue to turn to new channels to promote their products and services. One rapidly growing channel in the past 2 decades has been entertainment marketing spending. This group broadly includes event sponsorships and marketing and paid product placement. The channel generated $24.63 billion in 2009, a figure which represented a small drop (1.3%) from the previous year. However, PQ Media analysts expect growth to resume in 2010.

The news of the economic recovery has many business owners double-checking their sales figures. Revenues may not be as high as they’d expect at this point in the typical resurgence following a recession. That may be because this recession was longer and deeper than most recent downturns. Or the slow recovery may be linked to fundamental changes in consumer behavior. Either way, marketers are finding they have to change how they position themselves in order to boost sales.

Ad-ology Research recently updated their Industry Marketing Insights report for Bars and Nightclubs. The following are the predicted Top 3 Opportunities/Challenges from the report for this industry for the upcoming 12 months:

A generation ago, when the doctor wrote a prescription, the patient went to the pharmacy and filled it. In many cases the patient was female. And when the patient was male, it was often the female in the household who went to the pharmacy to fill the prescription. Those days are over.

The advent of online shopping has upended many supply chains. Consumers can now download music directly from a musician’s website instead of going to a traditional retailer. Experts are predicting the same market transformation could take place in the book publishing industry. Instead of perusing books in the aisles of a brick and mortar store, consumers can download e-books from author sites directly to digital readers. Where do these changes leave the CPG industry? Will the middlemen be cut out?

There’s nothing like the latest obesity reports to make consumers pay fresh attention to what they’re eating. This week’s release by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows that obesity has increased in over half of U.S. states. And for now, 38 states have obesity rates that exceed 25% of the population.