When driving to work just after Christmas, I was listening to an interview with an e-commerce company CEO who said something that made me laugh. She said, “In 09, flat is the new up.” If you did the same in final three months of 2008 as you did during the same period in 2007, she said you were ok. Well, I say, let’s not be content with flat just yet. Let’s raise our cups to a new year that will defy expectations!
With all the doom and gloom projected, it still does seem that budgets are still migrating online. Unlike the last burst bubble, this burst is aimed squarely at everything but online marketing. Wow, does that feel good. (I guess all that “pain in the you know what” measurement stuff we online marketers push all the time is paying off.) It also could be that our budgets are often still a pretty small percentage of overall budgets in the grand scheme of things and we have a long way to go.
From where I sit, the outlook for ’09 still looks pretty good and in some cases, better than ’09. So I am not ready to be content with “flat” just yet. If you find yourself not feeling quite as chipper and enthusiastic about the future of online as I am, here are some stats that may help you get to the other side of this recession, depression, downturn — whatever you want to call it.