Over the last few months, several of our corporate clients have discussed significant changes in how they execute their marketing and communications efforts. Several are planning to drastically shift how they use their agency partners and will bring key projects in-house. Others are looking to outsource marketing and creative functions to concentrate on their core business. These clients differ across industries and size including global b-to-b manufactures, financial services firms, non-profit organizations and professional services firms. Because of the number of clients grappling with the same issues, we want to dive in further to find out if these are unique occurrences or growing trends.

We are turning to the marketing and communications community to hear from you. How are you executing marketing and communications efforts?  Take our poll and check back for results: TAKE POLL NOW

In the mean time, here are a few articles I have come across recently on related topics that may also be of value in this discussion. Feel free to share your comments, insights and opinions on the topic here and on our poll.

Tough economy forces marketers to reorganize http://tinyurl.com/yfjghjd

Small ad agencies go over big http://tinyurl.com/yg98soe

Down economy drives small businesses and EAG http://tinyurl.com/yghcv6h

Marketing Business Services in Down Economy http://tinyurl.com/yl8etfc

Avoid the temptation to cut marketing budgets http://tinyurl.com/yf9ahe2  

In-house SEO vs. SEO Provider http://tinyurl.com/yf87yr9

Unless you are a marketer at Citigroup and have received billions in bailout money from the Federal Government:  you have a lot of work to do in 2009. There will be no corporate bailouts for most of us. Tightening your marketing budgets while still trying to drive new business and retain clients, in addition to creating customer evangelism isn’t going to be easy. BUT it could be getting cheaper.

There are a number of new social media weapons in our arsenal that enable us to communicate inexpensively with consumers on a one-on-one basis — and become evangelists for their brand. For instance, my view of Twitter (a new mobile phone social media platform) was forever changed recently when I “Twittered” my love of the AMC show Madmen. Moments after tweeting about the show I was pinged by “Betty Draper”, the lead character’s wife in the show. I clicked on her profile, and the link took me to a Twitter profile page for all of the main characters from the show who were Twittering about their lives circa early 1960’s Manhattan. I can’t imagine how cheap it was to do this. As a consumer, it was something I felt connected to on a very individual basis. This is just one example of the type of new media initiatives marketers can employ to create brand evangelists for their products.

One might say the Mad Men example is too different from the majority of CPG and services companies located in Chicago. Investigate the products people are talking about online. Check out this article on Facebook to see the level of interest that a paper towel can generate. The bottom line is that people are passionate about the smallest things and they ARE talking. No better time to engage them than now.

When you have stories like today’s Adage article concerning consumers being tired repetition in advertising, there seems to be a real opportunity for companies to step into this “ad vortex” and engage people more easily. It’s a whole lot cheaper than a million dollar ad campaign AND you don’t have to change your name to do it.