... the coming three years.

Predictions were proffered by WPP's GroupM, IPG's Magna Global  and Publicis Groupe's ZenithOptimedia. 

• According to the latter, global ad expenditure will gather a modest head of steam through to 2015. Spending will climb from 4.1% growth in 2013 to $518bn, while by 2015 this will have risen by 5.6% to $574bn.
   
• GroupM also foresees moderate growth next year, plumping for 4.5%. The WPP media shop cited continuing economic woes in Europe and a lack of blockbuster events that drive advertising, such as the Olympics and US elections.
   
• Magna Global lowered its forecast for the global advertising economy,  due in part to the slower than expected recovery by Western European economies. Globally, Magna believes the advertising economy will grow 3.1% in 2013 - 1.4% less than its previous projection in June of 2012, which was 4.5%.

Magna reports that the USA remains the world's largest market, projecting $153bn in advertising revenues for 2012 (4% higher than 2011) primarily due to higher political and Olympic advertising spending.

Without such economic stimulus next year, the Interpublic shop predicts that US ad revenues will grow by a meagre 0.6%.

Read the original unabridged MediaPost article.

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

... the year 2030. 

China's ambitions are high. By 2020, it aims to double its 2010 GDP and per capita income both of urban and rural residents.

The nation's economic track record has been impressive. It now has a middle class population of more than 300 million and has experienced the fastest ever economic growth over the past 30 years.

But it may not be able to maintain this momentum unless it overcomes one of its core policy challenges: water, both in terms of quantity and quality.

China's economy runs on water. Water is needed at one stage or another to generate energy. China's industry is the second largest water consumer - it consumes 139 billion cubic meters of water a year - with only the agriculture sector consuming more. And by 2030, Chinese industry's water consumption is projected to increase to 265 million cubic meters.

China is running out of water, which could soon curb its growth unless immediate countermeasures are taken.

The vast nation does not have much water to begin with. It is home to almost 20 percent of the world's population but has only 7 percent of its freshwater reserves. Water is one of its scarcest resources. And it is extremely inefficient in the use of water and a world leader in water pollution.

What exacerbates this shortage is the vicious circle of energy and water - if power-generating plants need water then water treatment and supply facilities need energy.

The Third World Centre for Water Management estimates that the water sector consumes as much as 25 percent of the electricity generated globally.

Though China's water sector is not yet among the country's most energy-intensive industries, it will gradually become so with new hubs of growth emerging in the water-scare western region and the increasing demand for wastewater treatment.

Already, about 52 percent of China's economic output comes from water-scarce regions.

Read the complete unabridged ChinaDaily article.

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... now."

The roadhouse is one of only six locations in the world outfitted with Tesla 'Superchargers' - six feet tall white slabs sited away from the gas pumps, as if implying they want no part of such primitive old technology.

Gloats the Forbes journalist: "Plugging in my sleek, silver $85,000 Tesla Motors Model S for a half-hour charge that will get me another 150 miles of range, a guy filling up his SUV ambles over. “How much is that costing you?”

“It’s free,” I reply. 

Solar panels supply the electricity at Supercharger stations, with a 500-kilowatt-hour supersize version of its car battery as backup storage.

That drives the cost of each station up to $250,000, but Tesla's backer Elon Musk says the solar panels will pay for themselves in a few years and his firm can sell stored power back to utilities.

According to Forbes.com, Tesla claims it is paying little or nothing to lease space for the charging stations. "Tesla so far has installed six supercharging stations in California and believes it will take only 100 locations to provide free coast-to-coast coverage, at a cost to the company of $25 million," writes Mr Woody.

So why does Woody believe that the future of 'Big Oil' is at threat?

“The clearest way to convey the message that electric cars are actually better than gasoline cars is to say charging is free," he says.

"Two major wild cards are at play. The first is China, the world’s biggest car market and one unabashedly interested, given its oil import dependency, in electric vehicles.

"The Chinese government has decreed that 5 million of them should be on the road by 2020 but has yet to decide on fixed or swappable batteries as the standard. China’s scale can decide the winner.

“Whoever is successful in this race in China will get the government to sanction and say, "This is the way to go," believes Ofer, an old China hand who has spent the past few years giving Better Place an inside track with Chinese policymakers, party bosses and automakers.

“They’re going to experiment for a while,” he adds. “And that’s why we need to move as fast as possible there.”

The second - and perhaps the more formidable - wild card is Warren Buffett, whose venture capital firm Berkshire Hathaway owns a 10% stake in BYD, a Chinese automaker that makes electric cars on Musk’s standard: non-swappable batteries.

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... how will new technology play a role in our lives eight years from now in 2020? 

Reports GeekWire journalist Taylor Soper: "The speakers had tons of insight, the discussion moved along well and there was plenty of time for audience questions".

The discussion was moderated by Scott Jacobson, a partner at Madrona Venture Group which funds innovative technology companies. The panel discussed everything from shopping with a mobile device to the pros and cons of physical and digital storefronts to analyzing how men shop differently than women.

They also talked about the planet's biggest and most famous e-commerce business, debating the impact of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the potential of physical Amazon stores.

Here’s what each of the panelists had to say about the future of e-commerce:

• Scott Jacobson, Partner, Madrona
  “Companies need to create a durable and competitive advantage. If they are selling the same products I can get on Amazon or Ebay, that is a very challenging place to start. But sometimes durable, competitive advantages come from a unique product where you’re the only one who can make it or sell it. Sometimes it comes from a differentiated business model. There are plenty of opportunities, but it’s got to be something that is both differentiated and durable. By default, if it’s not differentiated or not durable, then somebody else is going to do the same thing. Look at Zulily. They took a differentiated approach to curating product and featuring that product and took the line of, ‘We’re going to feature local brands nobody has ever heard of,’ as a marketing kind of thing. They are extremely good at both curating all that selection and then very cost-effectively acquiring email addresses that turn into people visiting the website that turns into customers. That’s differentiated — curating and scouring this stuff — and they’ve been able to demonstrate the durability.”
   
• Amal Jain, Distinguished Scientist, eBay
  “I would pay attention to the service part. Here’s an example: You empty a cereal box and throw it away in the trash. People who hate shopping want the new cereal box to show up in your kitchen or at the door at the very least. This is the kind of service to pay attention to. A few weeks ago, I was thinking of buying something and I thought I’d just buy it later. Then I forgot. It bugged me. So people, they want to buy those things right away.
  Another thing I would pay attention to is price discrimination/differentiation, especially with coupons.”
   
• Nadia Shouraboura, founder/ceo, Hointer
  “What you will see is the vast majority of products going online. The other products need innovation. If traditional brick-and-mortar stores innovate fast, they’ll hold on to the customer. It’s about innovation and change. We need change in traditional brick-and-mortar.”
   
• Gautam Gupta, co-founder/ceo, NatureBOX
  “There are two things to think about. One is to really invest and think about your product, the quality of your product and how to differentiate the product or experience that you bring to the market. The second thing to think about is customer acquisition. How do you get traffic in the door of your site and convert those visitors to customers? I think a lot of people start e-commerce websites betting on organic traffic and P.R. and things like that. My advice to an entrepreneur would be to take a step back and really think about how they’re going to do that. These businesses are centered around transactions, so either the math works or it doesn’t.”
   
• Alex Tibbetts. General Manager, Nordstrom
  “It’s something about building a business around the customer, not around the product. The possibility of doing so is different and better than it ever was before, and the benefit of doing so is potentially greater.”
   
• Shirish Nadkarni, Co-founder, Zoomingo
  “I think there’s going to be an interesting battle between the traditional retailers and the pure play etailers. The etailers will try to mitigate their disadvantage versus physical retail by doing a better job of curation, discovery and personalization. Right now it is very much a search-driven behavior. They will also try to do a better job of allowing the customer get a better sense of fit and finish. Physical retail will try to leverage digital — especially mobile — technologies to improve the customer experience so they continue to prefer going to physical stores over buying online. This means equipping both customers and sales associates with the right information to making the purchase decision, as well as improving the checkout process. They will also leverage their physical store assets to allow customers to either pick up items from local stores or even the reverse where they can order something from the store and have it delivered to their home.”

Commenting after the event, Bellevue Mayor Conrad Lee said: “When these smart people learn and share opportunities and ideas from other people, they do great things, we benefit from them creating new businesses and that’s what we depend on for our economy."

Factual data only is sourced from the original attributed article. The data is then enhanced by additional research and comment.

... the world’s largest economy, is no longer at the centre of the crisis and the inventory cycle is likely to provide some short-term support to world demand.

Other key NIESR predictions are:

• The Eurozone is forecast to contract by 0.5 per cent this year and grow only marginally next year with unemployment reaching ‘depression-era’ rates in some periphery economies. The USA is likely to grow by 2 per cent in each year.
   
• Growth in Brazil, Russia, India and China will be below long-term potential next year, although ‘hard-landings’ will be avoided; the impact on advanced economies will be offset by a large gain in competitiveness.

It is now five years since the beginning of the financial crisis and the world economy has yet to show signs of a broad self-sustaining expansion. In the advanced economies unemployment is at its highest level for thirty years and the (hitherto) fast growing emerging economies have also slowed.

Bold monetary policies by the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have reduced but not eliminated tail-risks.

The most likely scenario is that the Eurozone survives intact; the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) scheme has reduced the probability of a nation being unable to rollover its sovereign debts and led to an improvement in the spread of periphery versus core Eurozone country sovereign bond yields.

But the success of the scheme ultimately depends on the conditionality attached to new support and whether any discipline can be imposed on larger countries (such as Spain and Italy) if they are unable to meet the conditions.

A further risk is how the emergency monetary policy measures in the Eurozone, US and UK are ultimately reversed without destabilising inflation expectations.

Read the original unabridged NIESR article.

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... place the internet under the authority of the ITU.

The USA, however, argues that placing the internet under UN control would undermine the freewheeling nature of cyberspace, which promotes open commerce and free expression, and could give a green light for some countries to crack down on dissidents.

Objectors to this seismic change claim that some authoritarian states will back the move, and that most major Western nations will oppose it. If that's the case when it comes to the final vote, the balance of influence will lie in the hands of delegates from the developing world.

According to James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies: "The most likely outcome is a tie, and if that happens there won't be any dramatic changes, although that could change if the developing countries make a big push."

Mr Lewis conceded, however, that "there is a lot of discontent with how the internet is governed and the US will have to deal with that at some point".

He accepted that there is still an overwhelming perception that the US owns and manages the internet. Opponents, he says, "have a powerful argument" to create a global authority to manage the internet. He added: "We need to find some way to accommodate national laws in a way that doesn't sacrifice human rights."

Terry Kramer, the special US envoy for the talks, has outlined Washington's position opposing proposals by Russia, China and others to expand the ITU's authority to regulate the internet.

Speaking at a recent forum Kramer opined: "The internet has grown precisely because it has not been micro-managed or owned by any government or multinational organisation. There is no internet central office. Its openness and decentralisation are its strengths."

Read the original unabridged Times of India article.

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... such a law "would threaten its very existence".

However, Culture Minister Filippetti is unmoved by the Mountain View mammoth's plea. She told a parliamentary commission that a 'pay for news search tax' is "a tool that it seems important to me to develop".

Google France, ever mindful of the general good, pleads that the plan "would be harmful to the internet, internet users and news websites that benefit from the  substantial traffic" garnered by newspapers via Google's search engine.

Google claims it redirects four billion clicks to French media pages each month.

While Google would comfortably survive any such move by the French government, it would not be unscathed.

The real threat to the search engine's global dominance and profitability lies in the adoption of similar legislation across Europe and other world regions.

Read the original unabridged BBC article.

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... the World Bank nonetheless expects China to enjoy a soft landing - an opinion underscored by the bank's revised 7.7% growth forecast for this year and 8.1% for 2013.

Along with the USA, China is the world's major economic growth engine. Hence the presence in the communist nation of all five global ad agency holding groups - WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic, Havas and Publicis.

WPP ceo Sir Martin Sorrell has stressed long and loud the importance of the Chinese and Asia Pacific markets and - more to the point - put his shareholders' money where his mouth is, with WPP outposts in Hong Kong, India, Shanghai, Singapore and South Korea.

According to the World Bank's Data Monitor, ambitious investment plans announced by several regional governments in China could face funding constraints, "not least because governments are feeling the pinch of a cooling real estate market, which lowers land sales revenues".

The Bank also believes that [China's] central government is unlikely to introduce a major fiscal stimulus package, given that policymakers are concerned about a rebound in home prices and a possible reversal of hot money flows.

But the bank expects growth in China to pick up in 2013, helped by monetary policy measures introduced earlier this year and an acceleration of central government investment spending.

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... housing crisis is ninety percent behind us,” he told Bloomberg.com in an interview on 1 October.

Black Rock has been urging investors for more than a year to buy equities as the US economy expanded and the stock market rallied.

Mr Fink, of course, is not an entirely disinterested party.

Today [3-Oct-12] his  company commenced the third phase of a five-year branding campaign, with a series of advertisements telling savers to get out of cash and low-yielding bonds and suggesting they put money in high-quality stocks, exchange-traded funds and products that generate higher income.

BlackRock, which Fink co-founded in 1988 and then built through a series of acquisitions into a $3.56 trillion manager, is seeking to expand by attracting assets rather than making transformational deals.

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... "in the ranks of innovative nations" by 2020, spurring efforts to reform China's scientific and technological system.

The nation's leadership also aims to accelerate the building of a national innovative system and lay a foundation for the country to become a technological titan by 2049 when the nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of a united China.

The government document puts forward new measures to spur technological development, among them:

• Enterprises should become pillar for innovation;
• Supervision of research funds should be enhanced;
• Outstanding researchers aged below 35 should be encouraged to lead scientific projects.

With the international economic meltdown continuing to unfold, China is at a key stage of transforming its development model. The country's overall technological strength and competitiveness have played a leading role in economic and social development and safeguarding state security.

The framework document sets the goal for the country to be "in the ranks of innovative nations" by 2020, urging efforts to deepen the reform of the scientific and technological system. It also aims to step up the building of a national innovative system.

The longterm implications for the world's businesses and marketers are significant.

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