"Digital is the most easily cancelable," said Auerbach. "That's our cross to bear."
Jeff Lanctot, chief strategy officer at Razorfish, sounded a similar note back in October when he said, "The blessing of digital media, [the ability to] respond quickly, will become its curse...I think there's going to be widespread pain in digital media" Moritz Loew, senior director of national sales at MSNBC, believes much of the disappearing money can be traced to advertisers with mid-sized budgets.
"The middle class is gone from marketers right now," he said. "You see the bottom feeders getting stronger. In the top tier, we're getting more big deals than ever before -- the big custom branding stuff. It's the middle, your bread and butter $50,000 to $250,000 RFPs, that are going away."
Less than a year ago, one of the biggest factors limiting the growth of digital marketing was the talent shortage. There simply weren't enough seasoned interactive buyers, creatives, analytics pros, or search experts to fill the open positions.
