Ad Forecasts Get Worse, Rolling Stone Lays Off, Discovers Internet

Once again we’re grouping it together! First off, this from the Times telling us what we already know except in darker terms:

Advertising is bracing for the possibility of the first two consecutive yearly declines in spending since the early days of the Great Depression(!)…UBS canceled a presentation on newspaper ad spending for Monday, the first morning of the conference. Such presentations had long been a mainstay of the event, formally called the Global Media and Communications Conference…a UBS analyst who spoke at the conference, Matthieu Coppet, revised downward his estimates for ad spending. He previously forecast a decline in the United States next year of 5.9 percent compared with 2008; he changed that to a decline of 8.7 percent, primarily because local advertising could fall by a “double-digit level.”

Also, we also heard there were layoffs at Rolling Stone yesterday including, we hear, one of the higher-up editors, however(!) they have apparently hired their first-ever chief digital officer. So welcome to the nineties, we suppose.

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