The Honomichl figures are out and it seems the industry in the US declined by 3.5% last year. Given inflation of almost 2% I suppose it is an effective decline of closer to 5% – this in an industry that is supposed to be recession-proof!

Perhaps more interesting than the overall figure is the different changes by company. The agencies I think of as more ad hoc – Synovate, GfK, Kantar – had the worst of it with 10%+ declines. The larger syndicated companies – IMS Health, Nielsen et al – seemed to fair better and some even grew. So clearly the syndicated area stood up much better than the ad hoc (and probably tracking) parts of the industry.

Other notable performances include Communispace growing 18% and Dunnhumby growing 33%. So it is possible to thrive in this type of environement but it is the newer and more innovative companies that are doing it. So what does the relative strength of combined data sources (syndicated), pure data analytics (Dunnhumby) and interesting new consumer engagement techniques (Communispace) say about the direction of our industry?

If you put syndicated data at one end of a spectrum of closeness to consumers and ethnography at the other (one all about the consumer and one bearing little relation to any individual) it seems that it is the methods in the middle (ad hoc quant and tracking) that are getting squeezed…..