Retailers cutting marketing (or maybe not)

Lesson #1000 (or so) on why you shouldn't believe media headlines. Ad Age has an article with this header:

Retailers Shrink Ad Spending During Holiday Sales Period

But the actual story indicates that a survey says that 32% of retailers are cutting their marketing budgets, which would seem to indicate that more than 2/3 are not cutting.

BDO Seidman said that of the 100 chief marketing officers surveyed, 32% report having a smaller holiday advertising budget than last year. Forty-three percent of retailers said their budgets are flat, while only 25% said their budget would increase for the holiday season.

Hmmm ... that reads a little differently from the headline, doesn't it?

How to spin a story as negatively as possible is also demonstrated in this paragraph:

But CMOs are not only pessimistic about the holidays, they are uncertain about the economy's ability to recover. The vast majority, or 65%, of CMOs surveyed said they do not expect to see a meaningful turnaround in the economy until the third quarter of 2009 or later. Twenty-nine percent expect a recovery in the third quarter, while 17% are looking to the fourth quarter of next year for a recovery. Nearly a fifth of CMOs say they don't expect a turnaround until 2010.

Let's do some math: Apparently 35% of CMOs think the economy will recover earlier than Q3 '08, and 29% think the recovery will come in the third quarter, which means instead of reading:

The vast majority, or 65%, of CMOs surveyed said they do not expect to see a meaningful turnaround in the economy until the third quarter ...

It could just as truthfully read:

The vast majority, or 64%, of CMOs surveyed said they expect to see a turnaround by the third quarter ...

But that would be unchicly positive, wouldn't it?

Okay, I'll stop the bashing long enough to point out a rare positive piece of news for the newspaper biz -- 57% of respondents plan to spend a majority of their budgets in print.