Brexit approaches + more things

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Sky, Unilever and McDonald’s slash UK ad spend as Brexit approaches | The Drum – not terribly surprising. I would expect other changes as Brexit approaches. Changes in warehousing or even moving teams offshore. From a marketing perspective there is a compelling argument for a counter-cyclical strategy, which is how Proctor and Gamble built their brand in the US during the great depression via sponsored radio plays and serials which gave us the ‘soap opera’. The theory would go something like this. As Brexit approaches, media spend declines. Which means for flat or increasing spend your share of voice increases. Market share growth is directly related to share of voice.

China’s lunar new year spending growth slowest since 2005 | Financial TimesThat was an increase of 8.5 per cent from last year, a sharp drop from 2018’s year-on-year growth of 10.2 per cent and the slowest rate of growth since such data were first tracked, in 2005. – interesting numbers. China is seeing weakening capital investment due to recent interest rises, paired with declining consumer sentiment and consumer spending growth. It impacts global economic indicators and also the Communist Party of China plan for a ‘dual circulation’ economy. (paywall) More related posts here.

Opinion | China’s Online Censorship Stifles Trade, Too – The New York Times – I only agree to a point on this, China’s services, in particular Baidu who went to head-to-head with Google won out in China. This was as much down to Google’s lack of preparedness to invest in search indexing that would grow at the same rate as the Chinese net. Censorship then provided them an excuse to get out of China. Amazon China is still way behind JD.com and Alibaba and its market share has been going down for years. That doesn’t mean that these services shouldn’t be blocked in international expansion as part of the trade dispute, but also don’t discount US hubris so lightly