According to Ad Age, Coca-Cola is looking to save between $400 million and $500 million a year by the end of 2011. And it’s looking to find some of those savings in marketing.
According to The Wall Street Journal, General Motors, the nation’s fourth largest advertiser—they spent $2.1 billion last year—will also be making deep cuts. GM cut their ad spend by 24% from 2005 to 2006, and another 7.7% from 2006 to 2007.
Interpublic Group of Cos. Inc. likely will be affected by the cutbacks, as GM is among its top three clients. Publicis Groupe also counts GM as one of its largest clients.
On another front, Om Malik thinks Silicon Valley “should be worried.”
We know the housing and financial sector-related ads have already declined drastically, now we’re going to start to see other sectors cut back on advertising, too — and that is going to have a negative impact on everyone from large social networks to ad networks to Yahoo and Google to small startups, including weblogs like ours.
Daniel Gross, who covers the economy for Newsweek and Slate notes how the meltdown is being covered. “This is a story made for bloggers because there are so many manifestations of credit problems popping up: car sales, student loans, foreclosures in California, layoffs at Merrill Lynch,” he said. “The best blogs scour the Internet for bits and pieces that might seem random and then, by aggregating them, seem coherent.”