Brand Marketers Keep Spending Online

With Wall Street in crisis and a recession looming, it follows that marketers would slash budgets—particularly for newer forms of brand promotion such as social network advertising. Not so, says Keith Bobier, Unilever’s senior director of marketing. The company behind such brands as Axe deodorant and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter plans to continue to spend on sharable video ads, games, and other forms of widget advertising that can be spread across sites such as Facebook and MySpace. “We are not pulling in the reigns at all,” says Bobier. “There is nothing experimental about this for us. This is a serious part of our marketing mix.”

Web companies are hoping other brands react similarly to the tighter economic times. Firms such as Google and Microsoft have long touted the idea that budget crunched marketers will spend online, even as they cut back on other forms of advertising, thanks to the ability to track performance and easily adjust campaigns. “Near as we can tell, we just offer such great ROI [return on investment] for advertisers that they can directly see and measure, that advertisers in even difficult markets just have great inventive to get as much profitable inventory as they can,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin in a call with financial analysts late last year.