International quick notes

Unilever is planning expansion and growth in India and other developing markets: "The Asia and Africa market saw a 5% volume growth for Unilever in the third quarter, compared to 3.1% in Europe and 2.7% in North America."

Also in India, following up on this post from a couple weeks ago, the Wal-Mart/Bharti venture is being looked at by the Prime Minister's office. Thus far, the departments responsible have cleared the proposal, but the government is expecting push-back from opposition parties and from retailers.

Unilever rethinking advertising

Unilever has created a team to try to rethink the way the company advertises. Traditionally dependent on TV advertising, they see that medium as increasing ineffective, and have cut its share of their budget from 85% to 65% since 2000.

"The ad industry is struggling at the moment in . . . pulling all the components of brand communication together," Mr Rutherford said. "There is a struggle to have traditional media and digital and content and public relations all brought under one roof under the agency side."

Mr Rutherford said Unilever was stopping well short of setting up internal agencies, but was trying to spur change in its outside agencies. He said Unilever had assigned six people to help work on devising integrating campaigns for leading brands. Five were charged with finding new digital advertising ideas.

I think media fragmentation may be the biggest marketing issue of the next few years. At the national level, it's caused by the decline of network TV, and at the local level by the decline of newspapers (see the next post -- above).