1. Act differently! If you follow your competitors, you will fail. A smaller marketing budget will be better spent on insightful, relevant and different creative work to a select few, than generic communications to the masses.

2. Take the opportunity to refine your marketing strategy – re-focus on what’s important and plan for the future.

3. Be smarter in your targeting – is your product time specific or seasonal? If so, focus on the period that will generate the greatest yields. Refine your customer segmentation and focus on cross-selling and up-selling to higher value customers.

4. Cut out the wastage in your direct marketing – check your data against the mortuary file, make sure all your goneaways are stripped out, validate every record via tele-marketing to create more tightly targeted mailings

5. Collaborate with customers to find out how your product could be enhanced to help them through the recession – customers you have collaborated with are more likely to buy in to your products and this generates sales.

6. Use a smaller marketing budget to concentrate on core activity and make it work harder. Moving budgets from TV to online for example can save significantly on costs and still yield the same results. Equally, using word-of-mouth and customer advocacy can be a great way of reaching the right people at a fraction of the cost.

7. Reinvest acquisition budgets into research and development so that new products and services are ready for launch as your market begins to recover.

8. You won’t be alone in having your budgets cut – this will almost certainly be done to reflect a change in the market. Spend time learning about the smaller customers of your weakest competitors. Those with attractive growth prospects and strong balance sheets will yield future rewards.

9. Take stock of what’s been working and what hasn’t. You’ll have more time now to develop robust measurement devices and concentrate on what’s worked well in the past.

10. Challenge your bosses! Many cut budgets in times of recession, however, research shows that consumers don’t stop spending during a recession, plus the advertising environment will be less cluttered and subsequently less expensive. So really in times of recession, marketing budgets should be rising!

Amanda McDonald

The DMA’s Going Green in Manchester event last week posed a few interesting challenges for the attendees. Although as an industry we are only responsible for 2% of household waste, we are being placed under increasing scrutiny. As such, if we’re not whiter than white, we are exposing our trade and our colleagues to legislative pressure.

One thing we can all do to help our industry is to encourage recipients of our direct marketing print to recycle their unused mail, validate our data as much as possible and only mail those contacts that we are confident will yield the least wastage. So, not only can we do our bit to save the environment, we can also save some costs and save the future of our industry.

Amanda McDonald

I received some excellent feedback from Tina - the market researcher at the Recommended Agency Register - about what our clients said about us and what they valued. The feedback from all of our 10 clients and overall our score was "way above average" across all categories. We have been singled out as a Recommended Agency in these sectors: advertising, direct marketing and digital.

Many thanks to everyone for helping secure such a good review.

I had lunch today with Steve Antoniewicz who runs the Recommended Agency Register. They work with clients to recommend the right agencies for them. The growth of new digital channels has meant that marketing agencies have diversified beyond recognition. This has made it much more difficult for clients to choose the right agency. Steve's view is that the agencies which will be successful are those who can cut through the multitude of ways consumers can interact with brands. What's needed is a clear and concise strategy to help them build customer relationships. That's where we come in.

Amanda and I visited the Commercial Vehicle Show at the NEC yesterday. We were there to see several clients and happened to gatecrash the launch of a new Iveco truck. Shows are a great way to catch up with clients plus you get a good feel for what the competition are up to.

There’s now a new picture of the future of communications agencies. Gone are the days when agencies could simply use mass marketing tools to target groups by geography or age. A new concept has emerged - the connected agency. An agency that gets under the skin of its audiences to the point of membership, and only when it has attained the trust of a community can it introduce brands to them.

One example that we're involved with is to look at communities formed on large housing estates in Staffordshire. Particularly those with a high proliferation of social and council housing. We've found those communnities are still held together through geography. Recent research, undertaken by Staffordshire University in conjunction with Yes, discovered that 87% of people who lived in council houses in housing estates felt part of their community as opposed to 33% of those people who lived in private housing. People who lived in council housing were more likely to have micro-communities within their pubs, social clubs and at bingo where opinions are exchanged and formed.

So, whilst community marketing is the future, the old disciplines still apply – getting under the skin of your audience and keeping them at the heart of everything you do. The connected agency uniquely engages with its communities – regardless of who they are and how they operate. We’d even go so far as to say that those agencies that stick to doing what they’ve always done will fall by the wayside. Mass marketing and traditional demographics simply will not have a place in modern advertising.

The agencies that will out-perform their contemporaries over the next decade will be those who truly put the consumer at the heart of everything they do, seeing their role as identifying which brands to introduce to those communities and introducing them in a timely, appropriate and insightful fashion. Only then will we create an army of brand advocates and build powerful customer relationships that will sustain our brands now and for the future.

Amanda McDonald

Here's a Fine Gael poster promoting a Yes vote in the EU referendum. Crass and sexist perhaps but very effective...

We're in! For the fourth year in a row the agency has been recommended by its clients. This means we're included in the Recommended Agency Register for 2008. There's no better endorsement for an agency and the work it does than to be singled out by clients for its strengths in account handling, creativity, strategic thinking, value for money and overall professionalism. We're very pleased to be recognised in this way. Here's the note we received from Steve Antoniewicz:

"Many thanks for participating in our recent research and I'm pleased to tell you that your agency has achieved recommended status. During our research, your clients paid testimony to the high standards of services provided by your agency and we'll now be promoting the results of our research to marketing spenders across the UK to help them make more informed choice of agencies."

Here's the follow-up viral to the Gorillla ad produced by Fallon for Cadbury. I think the production values are pretty slick and it's good to hear 'Don't stop me now again' but... I just don't get it! There's no link to the choccy at all. Neither is there a link to the Gorilla ad - what about having a Gorilla driving the truck. Yet the timing with the Terminal 5 debacle is pretty comical - to release it this week was ingenious.