Posted: August 25, 2008

Advertising Perceptions, a market-research firm, recently released a study on advertiser optimism which makes one thing abundantly clear; advertisers and marketers are clearly concerned with the health of their industry and have already taken steps to weather the storm. Yet, even with the impending economic woes that advertisers have already begun to feel the effects of, there are two media categories with which advertisers seem to still have a healthy level of confidence; online and mobile.

While every category saw a decrease this year in the percentage of respondents who felt they would increase spending, online actually saw the only decrease in those who felt they would decrease spending and mobile only saw a 4% increase in those who would decrease spending, by far the two most optimistic results. Additionally, only 4% and 9% envisioned a decrease in online and mobile spending; the next closest category was Cable TV with a full 20% saying a decrease was imminent.

The results clearly point to an industry that has become much more cautious in the past few years, but has also seen online and mobile as the two areas which are the least effected by the current economic climate. When pressed for reasons for their answers, most respondents pointed to the accountability and raw metrics which can be derived from both online and mobile marketing that simply don’t exist for the other types of media.

While the level of consumer interest in print and radio has clearly declined with each year, the internet and mobile are experiencing unprecedented levels of expansion due to their immediacy and interactivity. And in the near future, mobile may emerge as an even bigger player than online as it is the pinnacle of both immediacy and interactivity, with more people having mobile phones than computers and a level of portability that even laptops cannot compete with.

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