Direct Mail, ‘New Marketing’ Drive Marcom Growth

Guerilla marketing soars

The fastest rising sector of the media industry is the overall growth of the marketing-based communications segment - areas unrelated to advertising such as direct marketing, consumer and trade promotion and public relations, according to a new Communications Industry Forecast being released this week by Veronis Suhler Stevenson. The research suggests that advertisers are shifting their spending into forms of marketing that have tangible ROI associated with them.

Direct mail in particular is contributing to the growth, and is projected to rise at a rate of 8.5 percent through 2010 (compared to the current growth rate of television at 5.0 percent growth). That rate is higher than the 8.0 percent predicted for the overall marketing services sector.

But so-called “new marketing” - that is, areas such as experiential marketing, branded entertainment and event marketing - has emerged as another fast-growing segment within the marketing-based communications sector.

This may be a sign that marketers are discovering new ways of reaching a younger and important consumer segment, writes MediaPost. “A lot of the marketing services sectors in the new marketing area are really targeted toward the 18- to 34-year-old. That’s where we see the growth in dollars really going forward,” Leo Kivijarv, vp-research at PQ Media, is quoted as saying. PQ Media helped VSS compile the report.

Other areas of the speedily growing segment include guerilla marketing, word-of-mouth, product placement, mobile marketing and webisodes.