eCommunications for global organisations

Back to wisdom to get back on track…I was very inspired by the first part of Barry Schwartz speech and was ready to write about why big organizations were not wise and why they did not know how and when to make an exception to every rule, with some juicy cases on guideline compliance. I then went through the entire video and just decided not to do so. His message is much more deep and fundamental than whatever I planed to write and there is much more value just passing the idea. Just take a 20 minutes break to hear a truth you and your company might have lost for a while.

A few months ago, when the crisis/recession started dominating the news in Europe, we tried to understand how these changes would affect our business - that is the business of online marketing.  We shared with you a couple of articles from McKinsey, the Economist and other sources (on this blog and on Ning) that all pointed to the possibility of the trend not affecting the web in a direct way or perhaps even the opposite.

Over the past two weeks I have been observing, first hand, the consequence of this trend in our day to day activities.  I have had a succession of meetings with new clients, sometimes old prospects, who have been very open to the very serious exploration and use of the internet as their core marketing channel for next year.  They all agree on the same thing: traditional marketing has been ‘frozen’ or cut or put on hold completely.  On the other hand they recognize that the web is a comparatively low cost alternative and is measurable.  Many of these companies or individuals have never taking this line before, and I think that it is actually being driven by the environment.

So it seems as if 2009, might be the year of the shift to online that we have been expecting for some time, driven not by hype, but by necessity, experience and an almost inevitable transformation of the marketing landscape.

We have yet to see how far and how deep the transformation will be, but 2009 will probably mark the no return shift to a new marketing structure.  Clearly, this is a very bad time to be in traditional advertising.