Any thoughts?

My response was really to make the point that for every negative there are three or four positives. These are indeed challenging times but if anything I believe the industry will come out stronger and more competitive in the medium to long term as agencies refocus and sharpen their propositions.

We weren’t sure whether to run this piece as we didn’t want to add any more negativity to the current situation. NMM exists to promote the wealth of talent in the region’s creative sector (specifically digital), encourage inter-trading and hopefully make companies outside of the region aware that the North East is a great place to do business. However, we are here to report on any relevant news stories so decided to run the piece.

We certainly weren’t claiming that the industry is in freefall, we were just posing a question to hear peoples views.

Being over dependent on public sector business (bgroup), loosing focus on core business competencies (Mere Mortals) or over leveraging debt (Robson Brown) are not necessarily showstoppers in themselves but if the business can’t adapt and change their model rapidly enough catastrophe is much harder to avoid.

In the case of larger organisations this is naturally harder to do than in the case of smaller, more agile firms some of which are growing and thriving in spite of the downturn.

There is a wealth of talent with the industry in the NE and I think it’s unfair to judge the state of the sector on the basis of recent failures by some of the established big players – their demise is more a case of poor strategy and management. I certainly don’t want the general perception of the industry as a whole being in ‘Freefall’. That is definitely bad for business.

Mere Mortals, for example, are resurgent after decisive action by the MD – shows what can be done when you apply a bit of vision…

Neil