It’s official

The quarterly marketing spend barometer, The Bellwether Report, seems to be sprouting some green shoots as the IPA talks of the market bottoming. Yes, the figures still indicate that the decline in spend across the board continued in Q1, but the decline appears to have slowed.

 ”This data supports the view that the bottom of the market has been reached,” says Moray MacLennan, IPA President, and CEO, M&C Saatchi Worldwide. “It will be a long road to full recovery, but this maybe the turning point.” The IPA’s suggestion that this signifies the beginning of the end, may be a little premature, but we can all take comfort from the fact that the budget slashing appears to have lost some of its momentum.

In particular, Direct Marketing is one of the Bellwether winners – spend fell by 12% – the same as Q4 2008, and far less than had been predicted. The hardest hit budgets were for ‘main media advertising’ and ‘all other’ media, which includes PR, events sponsorship and market research. Main media advertising, which includes TV advertising, was revised down by 33% in Q1 2009, the second-steepest decline in the survey’s nine-year history.

But generally, business confidence has picked up from the all-time low of Q4, with the percentage of companies believing their prospects have improved rising from 5% to 14%.

Not time to crack open the champagne just yet – but surely a hopeful.