Haven't visited with Vonage in a while and then I spotted this article over at ClickZ that looked at the Top 50 Advertisers by Media Value in July,2006. And, just what got me excited? No, one of my campaigns did not appear on the list. It showed that Verizon Wireless and NOT Vonage was the top ad spender. In fact, not only was Vonage not the number waster err I mean spender of ad dollars, the raw number seemed a lot lower than past months. Yes everyone knows that the numbers are over-reported, but unless TNS Media Intelligence changed their methodology I think it is significant. Perhaps someone at Vonage has been reading my past posts!
Vonage's highest spend this year was reported at $31.7 million during January 2006 and now has dropped to $12.6 million. That is a huge cut and before you scream seasonality I put this chart together and you can see how far behind 2005 their spending is. Also, using the raw numbers you can see that comparing July's reported numbers with their average monthly spend for 2nd Quarter shows a 27% decrease in spend. Hmmm, that number looks familiar to me.
A UBS research report summarized by way of a GigaOM article called Vonage Slowing Down? showed that UBS believes Vonage's daily net ads have slowed down from 2,800 per day to 2,200 per day and that AP Calc students translates into a 27% decrease. One could only conclude based on this huge coincidence, that someone in Vonage is starting to take an ROI approach to their wasteful spending and has cut back on their ad spending.
I'm sure that's what the Vonage is going on with their waste. Probably their media agency of record is feeling almost as much pain as is their shareholders - check that, nobody is feeling more pain than their shareholders (see chart below).
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
Comments