In it’s third annual study the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council had a team from Deloitte Consulting ask 650 marketers, from various companies and industries around the globe, 28 questions about budgets, activities, priorities and constraints. Here’s some of what was reported:

• As a percent of sales, 41% of the respondent’s reported their marketing budgets are less than 2% of sales, 60% are less than 4%  and 72% are under 6% of sales.
• Conversely, 12% of those surveyed have a 2009 marketing budget in excess of 11% of sales. [These must have been consumer companies.]
• In actual dollars, 47% indicated they have a budget of less than $1.0M while 80% stated their budget was less than $10.0M.
• Those dollars are divided into two primary categories: 41% is spent on people and 59% on programs and initiatives. The Council's position on this issue was clear, "more needs to be spent on programs and less on people going forward."
• The largest single item in the marketing budget was “website properties and digital platforms” at 13%. Strategy and Branding, and Product Marketing were tied at second with 12%, respectively.
• It’s not surprising then that 72% of respondents are increasing spending in Interactive Web, 62% will increase spending on Social Media activities and 57% are increasing funding for Search Engine Optimization.
• Apparently a lot of marketers are unhappy with their marketing agencies because 42% plan on changing their web design agency, 29% their interactive marketing company, and 27% their public relations firm.
• All that web-investment is impressive. The report states that 60% of those surveyed will spend less than $100,000 in 2009 on technology.
• The biggest issue for marketers was a lack of sufficient funding for new media (44%), followed by a lack of talented resources (33%), and, then, limited insight and understanding [by senior management] of new media (32%).
• In this environment 23% of those who responded said they feel their job is at risk, and another 20% are “Not sure.”
• When I think about a Chief Marketing Officer I think about a large company but 46% of the companies that responded were under $50.0M in revenues, 10% are between $51.0M and $100.0M, and another 14% (70% total) have sales under $500.0M.

The CMO added a few closing conclusions:

• Marketing noise and clutter will increase.
• While costs of production and distribution are declining in most industries, customer acquisition and retention costs are rising.
• The systematic and significant decline in interaction costs has made it easier for customers to switch products and suppliers.

Here are my conclusions:

• The Web is obviously driving the force behind marketing priorities. So my open-question is: “Are we, as marketers, driving Web activities or is the Web activity driving us?” [The answer is both. Make sure you're driving your company's web-activities and producing the planned for results. ]
• Print will continue to decline by 20%-30%. More magazines and newspapers will be in financial trouble and more will convert to an online only format.
• Video will explode as the Google-YouTube relationship matures and more companies realize that people no longer want to read. They want to receive information in an interesting and/or entertaining fashion, in a story.

Steve