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.

eMarketer has released revised metrics for online advertising growth over the next 5 years. Although we’re in the middle of a global slowdown, and the growth in online advertising has slowed with the rest of the world, there still appears to be growth ahead in the online advertising space.

Over the next 5 years, we’re still looking at roughly a double in the areas of online marketing that HEILBrice focuses on such as search engine marketing and optimization, display and rich media. When we look at online video, eMarketer is predicting a dramatic 8-fold spending increase.

US Online Advertising Spending Growth -$

When we look at these same metrics on a percentage basis, it looks as follows:

US Online Advertising Spending Growth - %