Industry news

Gartner: Economic pressures are causing a digital media strategy rethink

Finding themselves under increasing pressure from the economic uncertainty that currently prevails, media companies are looking for ways to reduce risk by demanding more accountability from their partners, it has been suggested.

According to research from Gartner, however, media companies are unwilling or unable to meet such demands, leading to an opportunity for specialists such as advertising agencies, networks or large publisher consortiums to bridge the gap between the two parties.

"Companies contemplating an economic downturn are likely to make adjustments to their marketing return-on-investment models," said Andrew Frank, research vice-president at Gartner.

"As they seek to shed risk from marketing investments, programmes that seemed sound months or even weeks ago are rendered unacceptable."

Gartner added that emerging high-end digital-media products and strategies, such as interactive video advertisements, would begin to look costly in the current climate and represent too much of a risk for digital media companies to proceed with.

Earlier this month, Gartner reported that most internet users log on to the internet mainly to search websites and check their mail, despite the massive proliferation and appeal of web 2.0 applications, such as video or social networking.