From Wall Street Journal:
Online advertising, which has gained traction in China in recent years, may be one of the few sectors to benefit from the country’s sharp economic slowdown, as companies here look for more cost-effective ways to plug their products.
Ad-industry executives and analysts say the need to trim costs, while still trying to woo customers, could cause the online, or digital, portions of companies’ ad budgets to grow, giving a boost to a market that has grown rapidly but remains puny compared with its size in the U.S.
“The economic crisis is…prompting a lot of our clients to rethink their marketing spending,” says Karl Cluck, a Shanghai partner at Mindshare, a media-buying unit of WPP PLC, which has worked with clients including Nike Inc. and Motorola Inc. in China. There is “a lot more interest” in digital advertising, he says, especially for marketers of youth-oriented products.
