This year for the first time, consumer packaged goods marketers attending the Promotion Marketing Association's (PMA) annual conference showed substantial interest in including the Internet in their brand marketing mix. Boni Liss Wolf of REALTIME Media who served as Conference Co-Chair, says, "A couple of years ago you would have never heard a discussion on interactive at PMA. Now they were talking about it in almost every session. In the past two months they're starting to look at the Web and say hey what are we going to do with this?" Although Liss Wolf has been involved in business-to-consumer online marketing for several years, she admits she is "really shocked" by how quickly packaged goods interest has grown recently.

However, Liss Wolf notes these marketers are definitely not interested in Web-only campaigns. Instead, integrated online/offline marketing is the name of the game. She says, "It's clicks to bricks or bricks to clicks. That's all."

In the meantime, while traditional business-to-consumer marketers such as McDonalds, Kraft and American Greetings are considering investing more in online, traditional business-to-business marketers are holding their online investment steady. Philip Mowris, Founder and CEO of The Mowris Group, a B-to-B marketing strategy consultancy, says, "Online spending is going to be about flat for a lot of the big B-to-B companies. They're not spending more but they're also not necessarily reducing a lot."

Mowris also notes that mid-tier B-to-B s, which have traditionally been more aggressive experimenting online than their bigger counterparts, now are investing in online marketing more cautiously. He says, "They're still investing more online, but they're doing it slower. The speed at which everything was happening has really slacked off. Companies still understand they have to do it, but they want to make sure they're doing it right. It's a philosophical change behind the spending rather than the spending itself."

MarketingSherpa recommendations for interactive marketing services and suppliers: if you are targeting B2C marketers, now is the time to get aggressive. Your best bet may be to partner with an offline channel or vendor these marketers are already comfortable with; and, present all pitches in terms of integrated marketing rather than online-only. If you are targeting B-to-B marketers, we recommend you polish up your white papers and Case Studies to impress them with best practices and proven results.