Here’s a thought for our country’s ad agencies and design shops:

With unemployment rate going as high as 10% in some states, it seems socially irresponsible to farm out production and manufacturing projects offshore. This is specially true in the production of in-store displays. The old practice of automatically sending out jobs to developing countries because of costs must be revisited.

A recent report by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai showed that the rising value of the yuan and increasing labor costs have diminished China’s competitiveness as a base for inexpensive manufacturing. Add that with shipping costs and the ever increasing eagerness of US manufacturers to lower their price structure, and the practice of domestically producing makes more and more sense.

There was a great feature on NPR recently about a Los Angeles-based food truck named Kogi and how they used Twitter to help build their business.

Kogi started peddling their Mexican-Korean cuisine in November 2008.  At first business was soft, but with the help of a new-media consultant, they went viral.  Kogi began networking with Twitter.

The food truck used Twitter to post the time and place they would be parking and let followers know if they were running late.  Before they knew it, their online community grew – over 14,000 followers – and so did their lines of hungry patrons.

Now business is booming for Kogi.  Hundreds of foodies wait for hours and spend good money… for tacos.  Watch a nice news story on it here.

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Twitter has been a great resource for FREE advertising, networking, and gathering customer testimonials.

In this real-time society, it’s crazy NOT to branch out into Twitter.

Here’s why:

1. Twitter is an excellent way to let your customers know who you are, what you have to offer, and what they need to know as it happens.
2. Your business can link to features on your webpage, share “tweetpics” of events going on RIGHT NOW inviting your customers to drop by, share customer testimonials.
3. Your business can send real-time updates to your customers’ cell phones.
4. 30,000,000+ users on Twitter.
5. It’s FREE.

This is the future of your customers.  This is the language they speak – in 140 characters or less.

Time Heals All Wounds.

The question on the minds of just about every media buyer and seller is: When is the ad market going to recover? When it comes to local television and radio, there are a few more years of hurting to come, according to a new forecast from SNL Kagan. The research firm is projecting a painfully slow recovery for both media in its forecast period, which stretches out to 2013. Spot TV spending will decline an average 2 percent each year between 2008 and 2013. Radio revenue will dip an average 1.9 percent. Each will see spending flattening out by 2010 or 2011, but any increases will be too slight to bring either back up to pre-recession levels by 2013. Kagan does see a decent bump for spot TV in 2010 from elections and the Winter Olympics. Ad spending will rise more than 5 percent. But even so it will be a down year compared to 2006 and 2008, the last two election and Olympics years, says Justin Nielson, senior analyst at SNL Kagan. “2008 was a down year [compared to 2006], despite record political spending,” he says. “We were going into the recession. TV doesn’t get back to 2008 levels by 2013.” As a point of comparison, forecaster Jack Myers recently issued an equally grim outlook. Myers expects spot TV to post a 20 percent decline in spending this year, down to $20 billion, with spending likely to post another 7 percent decline in 2010. He’s projecting that radio ad spending will plummet 19 percent this year, to $15 billion, and dip another 4 percent in 2010.

Interactive Gets the Edge On Radio.

Internet ad revenues surpassed radio in 2008. Internet ad revenue for the year rose 10.6% to $23.4 billion, up from $21.2 billion the previous year, whereas radio revenue fell 9% to $19.5 billion. Radio revenue is expected by Wachovia to fall another 13% this year. The Internet is now the third largest ad-supported medium, behind newspapers and TV. “We are seeing an ongoing secular shift from traditional to online media as marketers recognize that ad dollars invested in interactive media are effective at influencing consumers and delivering measurable results,” IAB President/CEO Randall Rothenberg is quoted as saying in Radio Ink. Despite a difficult U.S. economy, the report indicates that interactive advertising’s continued growth - though at a slower pace - confirms marketers’ increased confidence in the value in reaching consumers online. In the fourth quarter, internet ad revenues of $6.1 billion marked the first time the interactive advertising industry achieved, and surpassed, $6 billion in a single quarter. The figures represent a 4.5% increase from Q308 total of $5.8 billion and a 2.6% increase from 2007’s fourth quarter, which had revenues of $5.9 billion. 2008 marked the fifth consecutive year of record results, writes Marketing Charts.

Product Placement Goes Local.

While product-placement deals are usually the work of TV networks and major brands, local TV stations are getting into the act. For instance, local stations that air Meredith’s syndicated hour-long lifestyle program “Better” are now running customized videos that feature State Farm Insurance. Program syndicators “are a little bit more open” to adopting branded-entertainment ideas, compared to networks, “who have to deal with their own standards and practices,” says Ed Gold, State Farm ad director. Three-to-five minute videos centered on child-care topics, such as baby-proofing the home, are integrated into Meredith’s “Better” program. The videos are the creation of Meredith’s Video Solutions unit, which has also created custom videos for marketers, including General Electric, Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark. Other backers of syndicated programming are seeing the value of branded entertainment. Last year the syndicated-programming arm of CBS formed a special unit to introduce product integration ideas earlier in the program development process.

Strangest Media Opportunity of the Week: Ideas Anyone?

If you were at a New York deli or bar recently and suddenly had the urge to jot down an idea, your eyes might have happened upon just what you needed, a piece of paper with blue lines running across like the paper you once used in college. And it seemed to be everywhere–napkins with blue lines and sugar packets with blue lines, tray liners with blue lines. And if you went to the restroom, there it was again, toilet paper with blue lines. The lined paper came compliments of New York’s School of Visual Arts, and it was really an alternative media campaign to promote the school. The intent of the campaign was captured in the one-word tagline that appeared at the bottom of each execution: “Think: The School of Visual Arts.” We may think of Visual Arts as art school, and that it is, as its name makes clear, but the purpose of the campaign was to say that it’s really more. It’s about the creative process. It’s about imagination, about thinking. The campaign was the creation of Frank Anselmo, creative director at New York’s KNARF and also the instructor of a course at the school titled “Unconventional Advertising,” and it came about when the school’s administration asked him to create a campaign to promote the school.