Tomorrow begins what is going to be the most watched, measured and written about 120 hour period in modern business history. Starting with the tracking of the movement of people through flights, automobile, bus and rail and ending with an accounting of the staggering amounts of money spent on consumer goods, the American Thanksgiving weekend marks the start of the all important holiday retail season.
Tomorrow, everything American shuts down for an annual day of family, gratitude and spiritual reflection. The next day, Black Friday, everyone with credit left on their cards enters into an orgy of shopping. It’s an annual ritual that is almost Roman in its excess and in its social importance. All the holiday season sales start on Friday and the shopping will continue ’till the churches open their doors on Sunday morning. The national vibe then cycles back to spiritual reflection and everyone goes back to work the next day.
That’s the point we, the online marketing community, comes in. Since the mid-70’s, the Friday after Thanksgiving has been called “Black Friday”. Since the late-90’s, the Monday following Black Friday has been called “Cyber Monday”. That’s the day when people at work or at home head to the Internet to make or complete their holiday purchases. Both are important days for slightly different reasons.
Much of the news cycle on Friday and Saturday will be dedicated to how the brick-and-mortar retail sector fared on the opening days of the holiday season. With the economic outlook as bleak as it appears to be, the business and finance sectors will be watching the tales told by cash register tapes around America. A lower than expected rate of sales will bring news tinted by doom and gloom. A better than expected rate of sales will bring forth voices singing a tune of cautious joy.
Cyber Monday is considered as both a fallback and as an indicator. If Black Friday shows poorer than expected numbers, expect the financial world to wait with baited breath for Cyber Monday’s figures. That’s the fallback position. For those of us working in the digital marketing trenches however, Cyber Monday is an indicator of how the online economy is faring.
For the search and digital marketing industry, next week could be a very good week or it could be beyond bad. If it’s good, the industry will be far stronger than it is today. If numbers from Cyber Monday are bad however, the outcome could be disastrous for digital marketing firms based in regions were the credit-crisis has hit the hardest.
A good set of results from Cyber Monday would be reflective of consumers moving towards the Internet to save money on their holiday gift and entertaining purposes. An audible sigh of relief will be heard around the world if that happens. While online marketers fully understand the cost and resource savings associated with E-commerce purchases, the mainstream consumer world might or might not. Collectively, we already sense the numbers from Black Friday will be weaker than last year as we know consumer confidence is very low. Collectively, we hope the coming Cyber Monday will show stronger numbers than last year.
Given the doom and gloom expressed each evening on the news or in this case, in the Wall St. Journal, anything less than improved figures on Cyber Monday will be treated as an unmitigated disaster. The digital marketing community is already dealing with a deflated sense of hubris as the industry learns it is not in-fact immune to macro-economic conditions. Many US based SEM and online marketing firms are (this week) laying off staff and shuttering new initiatives. Poor numbers on Cyber Monday will send a palatable shutter through the Internet marketing industry and the business development sector of that industry.
That shudder will be radically premature, likely caused by critical misunderstanding of the misinformation being published out there. To be clear about this point, we have never faced this sort of situation before. The global economy is in rapid recession and could easily fall to depression. That is real. At the same time however, we have an alternative universal economic zone called the Internet. The Internet makes a world of difference at this time because of the cost savings it presents both businesses and consumers. While there is a direct connection between consumer confidence and online spending, the Internet economy WILL fare somewhat better than the mainstream economy and it will almost certainly recover far sooner.
We all hope Cyber Monday presents positive results. As an aside, the chairperson of SEMPO, (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization), Dana Todd will be ringing the opening bell at the NASDAQ exchange on Cyber Monday morning.
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