“The economy is zooming back,” says STRATA Advertising’s CEO, John Shelton. “Last year we were just barely seeing a little bit of a bounce, but now we’ve bounced all the way back.” According to Shelton, advertisers are now asking: “How do I make an impact? How do I get this product out?”
In an interview with Bloomberg News outlining the trends shown in a recently released survey of top advertising agencies, Shelton remarked that, overall, the industry feels “very good about where advertising is going.”
“The recession for advertising is over,” Shelton observed, while adding the cautionary note that it is not a boom per se. Rather, “we’re in that place between bottom and top.”
While traditional advertising outlets – print, television, radio and (yes) online media buys – reported substantial gains, Shelton noted that both social media marketing and mobile advertising struggled somewhat, as advertisers struggled with how to best implement social media marketing strategies and how to tap into the growing mobile market.
“What we’re seeing,” said Shelton, “is that social media is sort of staying with the advertisers and not going off to the agencies. And, secondly, we don’t believe that the ROI for social media is quite as obvious. So while (advertisers) know that something is good there, they are not quite able to put it back to the bottom line so they are being a bit more careful.”
“There was (also) a lot of expectations for mobile advertising,” he noted, “but right now we don’t have the technology that makes it useful. The blowout isn’t there yet. Lot’s of people (are) looking at it, but when it comes to putting dollars there, we don’t see it.”