Maybe it is because I have family in the USA and their view on life is more positive during recession, or the fact that I have seen it before! But as a marketer, I see a real opportunity to shine during a downturn.

The best business brains, as we are writing about in the next issue of the South West RDA's LINK magazine, see a real opportunity to make a buck during a recession. According to Phil Tellwright of SWAIN (South West Angel Investor Network), many business angels are "counter cyclical", meaning they invest when others, most notably the banks at the moment, lose their nerve. The theory being that with less competition, you stand to get a better price for your investment and therefore a much better return.

I subscribe to the notion that a £1 spent on marketing during a recession is worth £2 during a boom period. It's quite logical that you will get more bang-for-your-buck with your marketing budget while your short-sighted competitors are slashing marketing budgets for short term gain.

I like to quote Sam Walton who created the world’s biggest retailer, Walmart. During the last recession, he had this to say: “Recession? I thought about it and decided not to take part.”

 

The Western Daily Press has scooped one of the most popular blogs on the internet, the Huffington Post, today. I have blogged about the Huffington Post (ranked no1 most powerful blog by the Observer) before.

Western Daily Press broke the story that Monty Python legend John Cleese is to offer his services as a speech writer to Barack Obama, if he wins the Democratic nomination to become US president!

The story was first picked up by Andy Wright's (Editor WDP) Bristol reporter and now is big news in the States.

The Western Daily Press picked up the story as they are celebrating their 150th birthday with a flash new multi-media room, which Andy describes as a "1,000 times better" he went on to say that " I knew there’d been a fair amount of interest judging by the numbers viewing that story but had no idea that it had been picked up by the Huffington Post!"

As the Montage team flagged up the good news from our own media centre, Andy let us into a little secret:

"It was actually a story picked up by our Bristol City reporter as he was setting people up for quotes should Bristol city be promoted!"

I guess, flash news rooms apart, that there is no substitute to good old fashioned journalism and an eye for a top story.

Perhaps John could teach Obama a few silly walks too?

Having a great day here at Montage. My online social networking has meant that I am potentially meeting a public sector ICT champion next week and he is now my Twitter buddy.

A very successful IT company, based in London, is looking to expand its services in Bristol. They canceled a meeting with a marketing company today, during a visit to Bristol, deciding that PR is perhaps a better route to look at.

What did they do at such short notice? They googled online PR, saw our site and said that we are obviously "switched on". Kudos indeed for the Montage team.....

Just thought that I would point out that I am blogging over on Connecting Bristol's blog at the moment.

It is all very political over there and we are discussing the best use of political blogging, the No10 Twitter blog and much more.

This week it is featuring Stephen Coleman the Professor of Political Communication at Leeds University and he has a lot of interesting points to make.