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ML Digital Industry Survey Results

19 November 2008

Current Industry sentiment and the Impact of the Economic Downturn in both the Australian and San Francisco Digital Media & Technology markets

We had a great response to our survey, thanks to everyone who participated. From speaking with many of you over the last few weeks, I know we are all looking forward to seeing the results and getting a bit of a gauge on how the economic downturn is effecting our industry.

It is important to remember that the sample space for this survey was exclusively in the technology and digital media sectors, and all answers were anonymous. We think this survey is quite unique in that we have the advantage of being able to compare answers from both our Australian and San Francisco networks, and it makes for some interesting reading!

We hope to be able to compare and contrast this quarters survey results in our next quarterly newsletter in March 2009. It will no doubt be interesting to see how the market evolves over the Christmas and New Year period. If anyone has any suggestions on questions they would like to see asked in our next survey or how we can improve our questions then please let me know.

Below are the key findings from the MitchelLake Survey on “Economic Downturn and the effect on Digital Media & Technology”:

It seems as though the majority of us feel that the October stock market crash is having a negative impact on online consumer spend, with 73% of participants under this opinion. Interestingly enough however, only 1.9% of us believe there are no opportunities for digitally driven companies to grow in the current market climate, with 28% seeing opportunities for positive growth in the sector here in Australia. The San Francisco market looked positively more assured, with 74% saying there were definite opportunities for technology driven companies to prosper in this market.

Looking at key growth areas, the three predicted areas for growth in our industry for the next 6 – 12 months in Australia are seen to be online advertising (27.3%), followed closely by mobile marketing (25.8%) and social networking, which was ranked equally as having the highest and second highest growth over the said period. Video advertising is also predicted to be a strong growth area, while content subscription was distinctly ranked as a low growth area.

But how has this effected demand? 32% of Australian participants said they had not felt any decline in demand for their services/products, an interesting statistic when compared when only 11.5% of people surveyed who said the market conditions had not effected or changed their business strategy. This indicates that the downturn has prompted a change in strategic direction for the majority of organizations in our sector, as we move to counteract any decline in business.  

Additionally, our results reveal that travel, recruitment and events are the areas in which most companies will be looking to cut costs across both the San Francisco and Australia markets, with participants from both markets also agreeing that current conditions will last for the next 18 months.

On the job front, we had some contradictory responses with 32% of us stating that the economic climate is in no way impacting our decision to look for a new job, whilst 13% said the change in market conditions had greatly impacted their decision to look for work. In terms of job security, we had polar opposite responses when asked whether we felt secure in our current roles – 23% of us said “not at all” and 21% said “to a great extent”, with around 40% of us still feeling somewhat secure despite market conditions here in Australia. The feeling was again different in San Francisco, with an incredible 92% of people stating that they felt somewhat or very secure in their current roles, and only 8.7% indicating they felt “not at all” secure.

Some strong indications for the innovators of our industry, with only 15.6% of people surveyed saying that they believed low cost solutions will prevail over technological innovation.

Thanks so much again to everyone that participated. If anyone would like further insight into the results from the San Francisco survey feel free to drop me a line at jacinta@mitchelLake.com .

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Written by: Jacinta Coyle

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