Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Adam Mizel - Aquifer Capital.
Adam Mizel - Aquifer Capital Group, LLC
Can you give a better sense of both the issues that you are hearing from your clients around their marketing spend and their plans going forward and what are the likely drivers that either improve or make worse the decision-making that is going on at the client level as we look at the next 6-12 months?
Charles F. Tarzian
I think in conversations we are having across the board, I think it’s a mixed bag. As we said, we are anticipating that we would have some growth incent. Some of our clients have told us, look, right now, particularly in this quarter, we are going to stay flat. We have projects in the pipeline with other clients that have pushed some of those projects, and when I say projects I mean with our existing client base out a quarter or two. There’s a lot of surveying and reflection going on in the client base. That’s the best that I can give you in terms of what they’re saying and what they’re doing. It’s as much a condition of postponement as it is a reflection of what’s going on the economy.
Adam Mizel - Aquifer Capital Group, LLC
What about as you compete for new business with new clients? Is that easier or harder in light of the environment we’re in and how does that impact the business?
Charles F. Tarzian
I would say that the pipeline that we currently have and the net new clients that we are currently talking to are very, very interested in the story that we’ve produced and in the kinds of things that we can do for them. I had told you before, I think on the last call, Adam, that we have probably as well as everyone else, missed out on opportunities because of the economic conditions, because clients that we don’t have or we’re not talking to have also postponed new spend or are looking for new partners to help drive their business. I will say, the ones that we are talking to are looking very specifically at the measurability of the programs that we’re delivering. So they are basically saying to us what will this do from an ROI perspective? How is this going to help us because they are shutting their spend down in terms of things like advertising and other less measurable kinds of activities. I will say that the pipeline and the conversation that we’re having reflects that in terms of clients’ move to more measurability, the clients’ move to social media and communities, things of that nature that we’ve spoken about in previous calls.
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