AdMedia Partners earlier this week released the results of its 16^th annual survey of media and marketing services executives.  This appears to be a fairly significant undertaking, as the survey goes to some 7,400 executives in the advertising, marketing services and related industries, according to AdMedia Partners. (I say “appears to be” because, oddly, AdMedia Partners won’t disclose how many of those folks actually completed the survey – which is the subject of another post.)

First, the good news – sort of: folks are optimistic that the worst of the recession is behind us, with 68% believing we’re in an economic recovery. Consequently, they expect an increase in advertising budgets, with a median increase of 3% overall and 10% in interactive advertising.

While a 3% increase is certainly better than the 5% decrease in the prior year’s survey, it’s still not much. In fact, it’s 40% less than the 5% increases respondents in the 2006, 2007 and 2008 surveys reported.  On the other hand, you’re probably getting better deals for your dollar so maybe it’s a wash.

Where things get really interesting is in perceptions of online content companies and social media.  Nearly half of respondents (45%) consider growth opportunities for sites that focus on user-generated content to be overrated, while a whopping 63% think the same for social media sites.

At the same time, however, when asked about plans for expansion in 2010, 78% of respondents indicated one or more online marketing sectors, with the most popular choice being “word-of-mouth/social media marketing” at 55%.

So, respondents consider social media to be overrated, but that’s not going to stop them from expanding into social media.

Now I’m not bashing social media here; I do think it has a role to play in marketing.  I wouldn’t be writing this blog if I didn’t.  But from survey results like this, it’s clear that there’s no shortage of confusion over what that role is and how effective social media will ultimately be.

Of course, where there’s confusion, there’s opportunity. So I’d say marketers are right to get into the social media fray and try to figure out what works.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 12:45 pm and is filed under IT marketing, marketing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.