Best Nicole

Interactive media will represent nearly one of every five dollars spent by marketers on media in the U.S. next year, according to estimates released Wednesday by WPP’s GroupM unit, the largest buyer of media in the world. The agency holding company’s new global ad spending forecast predicts interactive media, primarily online, will represent 17% of the U.S. advertising marketplace in 2010, up from 15.4% in 2009, and making.

 That makes interactive the third largest medium in the U.S., behind television’s 44.2% share, and magazine’s 18.4% share of 2010 advertising budgets. According to GroupM’s estimates, interactive media will overtake newspaper’s U.S. advertising share this year. Newspapers, which had a 14.8% share of U.S. ad spending in 2008, will fall to a 13.6% share this year, and a 12.4% share next year. Interactive media had a 13.9% share in 2008.

Radio’s U.S. advertising share also continues to erode, dropping to 5.6% this year, from 6.0% in 2008. GroupM predicts radio’s share of U.S. ad spending will drop to 5.2% in 2010.

Out-of-home media spending remains steady at 2.7%.

While the U.S. isn’t the largest interactive media marketplace in the world in terms of penetration, it is the biggest in terms of advertising volume. While the GroupM report does not break out the components of interactive media, it estimates that marketers will spend $23.9 billion on interactive media in the U.S. in 2010, representing 39.9% of the world’s $59.9 billion interactive advertising marketplace.

The largest market in terms of interactive media penetration is the U.K., where British marketers will spend 30.9% of their advertising budgets on interactive media, followed by Denmark, where interactive media will have a 28.4% share next year. Ireland has the smallest interactive advertising penetration of any major Western industrialized nation, with a 3.0% share in 2010, up from just 1.8% in 2009.

Globally, marketers will invest 14.6% of their worldwide advertising budgets on interactive media, up from 13.2% in 2009.

GroupM Futures Director Adam Smith, the author of the new forecast, said the only other major media to increase share during the global advertising recession are TV and outdoor media.

“TV and out-of-home have both added share of global ad investment, while newspapers continue to shed a point of share a year,” he noted in the report. “It may also be the case that TV and out-of-home’s relative cheapness compared to newspapers has encouraged this, and perhaps newspapers have been less willing to flex pricing too.”

As Belinda Parmar says in the “About US” section of the Lady Geek site, “It’s clear that there are very few companies within the tech space who are effectively targeting women. Those that do fall in to the clichés and stereotypes and end up pinking up and dumbing down their products and end up as one woman said, ‘treating them like a special needs case.’ Those that don’t even have any communication strategy targeted at women are missing our on £600million that is just going begging for the taking. Hello boys!”

Best Nicole

There are not many female CEOs of companies around. Although women are traditionally underrepresented in technology professions, there were a number of high profile CEOs in the US in recent years. We can think here of Carly Fiorina, formerly of HP, and Anne M. Mulcahy, of Xerox. Now Xerox has entered history books by appointing the first African American female CEO to lead a major US corporation: Ursula Burns. Interestingly enough she is also the first female CEO who succeeded another female CEO.

 

Burns had a long-term career at Xerox. Burns, who holds degrees from NYU and Columbia University, joined Xerox in 1980 first as a summer intern and then in product development and planning. In 2000, she was named senior vice president, Corporate Strategic Services and in 2007 she became president of Xerox.

Business Week suggests that part of reason that Xerox appointed two female CEOs in a row is Xerox’s commitment to diversity. 30% of Xerox’s executives are women and 22% are minorities. Xerox has a long tradition of affinity networks. Xerox also had a Executive Diversity Council early on. In addition there are leadership programmes that foster diversity and managers are evaluated in their performance reviews on their ability to recruit, retain and promote underrepresented groups. If they fall short of expectations their chances of promotion are diminished and they pay is negatively affected. This shows that diversity programmes do have an impact – even though it might take decades for them to unfold their power.