Gorrie's story: the $10M deal (or: how advertisers may start ditching above-the-line spots)

Rob Gorrie is kicking off 2009 with a series of great blog posts. Let's hope he finds the time to keep it up for the rest of the year.  If you're not a regular follower of his blog, there's at least one article that you should check out -- an anecdote from a CPG that wanted to re-think their media mix to see what a world without spending money on broadcast TV ads would look like:

In mid December (on a Monday), one of my sales people came to me, extremely excited.  It turned out that a buyer had just called him, panicked, because his client (a CPG - Consumer Packaged Goods) had just told him to cancel all of their broadcast dollars for the following year (or as much as their cancellation clauses allowed). The final number to play with was around 10 million dollars.  The client also said that they wanted a new plan for 2009 that didn’t include radio or TV - at all. Oh - and by the way - they wanted a new plan by Thursday.  We were - of course - more than happy to help out

I don't think manufacturers or retailers are about to start abandoning TV commercials en masse just yet, but whereas in the past such a story would be completely unthinkable, the combination of a crappy economy and decreasing returns on TV ad spending has forced these companies to start looking for alternatives to their old standbys.

Tags: out-of-home advertising, retail media, ooh