Interactive Marketers Are Bullish In A Recession

In a recession, marketers typically cut interactive spending. But our survey of 333 interactive marketers revealed strong support for maintaining or increasing budgets in categories including social networking, email, blogging, and search optimization. Among 12 major categories only online displays ads looked soft. Professional services, financial services, and media marketers are most likely to plan increases in interactive marketing. In a recession like this, marketers should focus on the measurability of their online and social applications and think in terms of building long-term assets, not one-off campaigns to boost quarterly sales.