Traditional marketing is at risk, US Q1 spend plummets

Fellow marketers this is serious news. We need to react strongly and bring back CEOs and their staff confidence in marketing - especially in marketing 2.0- up again. According to Blackfriars recent announcement, US Companies did spend 54% less in Q1 than budgeted. Their Q1 index was the lowest in two years and the spending categories reflect traditional marketing mindset. What strikes me again is that on-line marketing spend totals 26% of all marketing spend, and uses mainly Internet advertising (nearly 58%). PR suffers (5% actuals vs 9% budgeted) when advertising gets the bells and whistles (34% actuals vs 22% budgeted). When all marketing 2.0 professionals are highlighting why embarking customers as co-marketers a.k.a. focus on customer centric marketing, is a must, when CEOs are complaining about marketing ROI, why in the world would we reinforce traditional advertising? Do we want to get Dell'd?
We also should be aware by now that isolated advertising does not lead to more sales. Advertising needs synchronous PR and on-line relevance/positive resonance to get a chance for our message to be well accepted, especially nowadays where an average individual is exposed to several thousands messages a day. We know best tactics for quality demand creation are Free trial demos, Webcast/Webinars, White papers and blogs. We know Integrated Marketing is the only effective way to execute - if you still wonder, I guess the shortest way to success left for you would be faith. We know a concise marketing dashboard with ROI driven metrics is the only possible way to articulate marketing value to our CEOs.
Knowing all of this we should never ever see such numbers and CEOs complaints again. Let's make sure we put our money where our mouth is: focus our marketing spend on appropriate tactics. And let's use our communication skills to demonstrate to our CEOs that marketing in its latest development a.k.a. marketing 2.0 is the way to accelerate companies growth.