You lose 50% of your marketing budget, what happens next?

What would you do if your marketing budget was slashed by 50%? How would you decide how to spend what remained? Would you shift it into online and hope the online marketing promise of greater ROI and accountability was true? This was the intriguing and slightly disturbing scenario posed by Zed digital's Shalabh Pandey, during Marketing magazine's digital marketing thought leadership roundtable held this afternoon in Singapore.

With delegates from both agency and client side including DHL Global Mail, Standard Chartered Bank, BMW, Hardware Zone, Meritus Hotels and Resorts, a healthy debate rose over what stage digital marketing take-up was at in Singapore, the value of social networks and search marketing, why some marketers and agencies are slow on the take-up and even who's fault that is.

DHL Global Mail, director of commercial, sales & marketing Asia Pacific & EMMEA, Jan-Willem Adrian, said razoring his budget by half would certainly get him thinking hard about how he spent the remainder and while some of it would go into online, he would also look at smaller number, higher engagement options.

A number of those in attendance said working the kind of hours they did gives them little time to keep up to date with online innovations in media and platforms and therefore weren't 100% comfortable implementing programs that utilised technologies they didn't understand themselves. There was also agreement that while the online space was rapidly evolving, marketers couldn't sit still and wait to see where it all settled; they needed to get in and try things in order to reach their targets, but they also needed to be mindful of who they were trying to reach.

Measurement was another hot-button issue as the conversation moved to what results and costs should be associated with online marketing spend. This prompted BMW Group Asia marketing director, Ramesh Divyanathan, to offer a hypothetical challenge to agencies and online media owners to share the costs of customer acquisition and be paid on a cost per acquisition model only.

While most participants recognised the take-up of digital marketing and commerce was dismally low in Singapore, to understand the real figures the market needed to be broken up into categories. For instance, Meritus Hotels & Resorts' William Chua, pointed out that travel enjoyed a much higher level of acceptance of online models than some other categories, particularly in online research and transactions.

There was also healthy debate as to whether online branding initiatives that tested the waters were a worthwhile investment or whether digital marketing needed to be a more tactical spend.

The two-and-a-half-hour debate raised as many questions as it answered, with all agreeing there is no easy solution to getting more budget commitment to the online marketing space in Singapore.

For full coverage of today's roundtable please see the August edition of Marketing magazine. This roundtable event was enabled by Lighthouse Events and sponsored by HardwareZone.com and clickTRUE.