World Financial Crisis effecting your...

So far,  I've only had one client who has cancelled/postponed a project because of "what's happening in the world".  The amazing thing is, his business is going extremely well and, aside from the panic and fear created by our media and politicians, he has no real reason (as far as I can see) to panic himself.

I remember the last recession of the late 80s / early 90s very well - I was at the very beginning of my career back then and one of the things that stuck in my head was reading a report toward the end of the recession.  The report was the result of a survey carried out on advertising expenditure and the survival of businesses during the recession in the UK.  The results were not surprising but interesting nonetheless.  The results showed that the businesses that survived the best were those that either maintained or increased their advertising revenue.  In stark contrast, many of those businesses that cut back advertising expenditure, suffered greatly or went out of business altogether.

The moral of the story?  If you want to survive a recession - the last expense you want to cut is your advertising budget - if anything, you want to increase it.  It may well be that you don't get as much bang for your advertising buck during a recession than you do during a boom time but a correctly targeted marketing campaign will ensure that you at least get some bang.

i agree - people should be very careful when cutting their marketing budgets - unless off course they are burning money and the company is about to go under.

recessions are a great opportunity to get in front of competitors.

 on a side note to this topic, i am thinknig that blogs will also largely be hit... a lot of them like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb rely on brand sponsorship and I think their rates will have to drop dramatically to keep their spots full...

 Yes, we're seeing money drop out of magazine and newspaper budgets into online so it's a good thing, however we're also seeing clients 40%-50% down on the sales of 12 months ago so it's unlikely to last.  We're going to see huge cuts to all spending.

 i agree that spending from traditional will start to flow online, like newspaper ads etc. however just like you also said, i think a lot of internet ad spend will drop soon... especially the 'brand' spending.