US Marketers Confident Of Increasing Budgets In 2003, Finds Myers

Advertising agency executives, on the other hand, are slightly less confident than the marketers. Only 3.8% of agency people are expecting their clients to increase budgets by 8% or more, whilst 60.4% forecast gains of 1% to 8%.

The quarterly survey was conducted online in late December among 143 executives from major national and regional marketers, advertising agencies, media buying agencies and media sales groups.

Media sales executives held an extremely positive outlook for the media market, with 42% expecting spending increases of more than 8% and another 42% anticipating 1%-8% percent increases. “While the market is strong, media sales organisations may want to set more realistic forecasts for their 2003 revenues,” warns Myers.

Online looks strong Myers says that online media should prepare for a banner year, with marketers displaying strong confidence in a range of online platforms, including email campaigns, ecommerce, targeted websites and sponsorships.

Email looks the most popular, with almost 60% of marketers are expecting to increase their budgets to email marketing this year. Interestingly, only 25% are projecting increases in spend on banner and pop-up ads.

Advertising Confidence Index Myers evaluates spending projections for 32 media and marketing categories. While all except promotion and newspapers broke into the overall plus column for expected 2003 budgeting, the strongest growth is predicted for direct and database marketing, online marketing and network cable TV.

Based on projected spending increases and decreases, Myers assigns a weighting value to each spending level, based on a 100 scale; 50 represents no growth and respective increases and decreases are reflected by the 1-100 index. On this basis, the full data are shown below.