6,000 Tech Marketing Jobs Will Be Lost in 2009, According to IDC

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Some CMOs Lose Power asNew Executive Roles Emerge

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.,September 15, 2008– The IDC CMOAdvisory Practice projects that IT vendor marketing budgets will decline by8.3% for the full year 2009, the first decrease in year-on-year marketing spendsince the dot-com bust of 2001-2002. IDC analysts are also observing that manymarketing executives are facing organizational pressure during 2009, with morethan 70% of senior marketers indicating that their marketing departments areexperiencing "significant organizational change" in IDC's latestsurvey of CMO's. IDC projects that 6,000 tech marketing jobs will be lost bythe end of 2009.

Richard Vancil, vicepresident of IDC's Executive Advisory Group noted some key trends within thetech marketing community. "Most marketing departments remain adequatelyfunded – even with these recession-led budget cuts. The problem is, many fundsand activities aren't in the right place. It's our observation that the bestCMOs and marketing leaders are still making progress this year, and they aredoing so through re-direction and re-deployment of existing budgets. They aremoving money from product-line marketing to streamlined thematic campaigns. Theyare creating more shared services that remove redundancy in complex marketingorganizations. And this year, Sales Enablement has been a major trend that canreduce expenses while boosting productivity."

The 2009 recession is alsocausing significant organizational pressure on tech marketing and salesorganizations. Vancil noted, "The root cause of organizational change isthe continued dysfunction between marketing and sales; where money is wastedand processes are sloppy. And so, in 2009, at many companies, we are seeing thecreation of a more unified sales and marketing organization. In some cases,global marketing and sales are now organizationally united under one executivewith the title of 'Chief Sales and Marketing Officer' or 'SVP ofWW Field Operations.' This is a cause for concern for some CMOs who may belosing power, because those big areas of budget savings and impact that wesuggest be identified and executed, are really only available when the CMO hasinfluence over all marketing: corporate, product , and field."

The new insights andanalysis are from IDC's CMO Advisory Practice, the tech industry's mostcomprehensive benchmarking and advisory offering for tech marketing leadership.IDC's seventh annual Technology Marketing Benchmarks Survey, completed inSeptember 2009 provides insight into the management techniques and investmentstrategies based on IDC's unique access to the world's largest and mostinfluential technology marketing leaders.

In the upcoming study,MarketingInvestment Planner 2010: Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators, IDCprovides a comprehensive analysis of qualitative and quantitative marketinginvestment priorities, marketing-mix decisions, and operational andorganization information for many of the world's leading and most influentialtechnology vendors. This study is based on surveys and interviews conductedwith senior marketing executives of the leading IT hardware, software, andservices vendors, including Adobe, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, SAP, Symantec, and Xerox;representing more than $400 billion in IT revenues and over $15 billion inmarketing spending.

The Tech MarketingBenchmarks analysis is the cornerstone of the IDC CMO Advisory Practice, aresearch service that provides analysis and insight to IT marketers to improvethe productivity and efficiency of their marketing practice.

About IDC's CMO AdvisoryPractice

The CMO Advisory Practiceprovides IT marketing executives with the industry's most respected marketingbenchmarks, research-based advice, and peer-networking, to strengthen planning,operational, and market-execution decisions. The CMO Advisory Practice is apart of IDC’s Executive Advisory Group which provides Sales, Marketing andMarket Intelligence executives with critical insights and research-basedinformation to plan investments, prepare operations, mobilize resources, andmeasure results. Members also accessthe collective knowledge of peer-level managers to gain the insights of fellowpractitioners.

For more information on theIDC CMO Advisory Service, contact Michelle Blondin at 508-988-7579 andmblondin@idc.com.

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