2008 may not be boom year for ads after all
This year was supposed to be a boom year for advertising globally, with the Olympics and the US Presidential elections boosting spending, credit crunch or no credit crunch.
WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell has been talking up 2008 for a couple of years now, although warning that things will slip back in 2009.
With the Beijing games about to kick off, some advertisers at least will be digging deep to take advantage of a one-off opportunity and Messrs Obama and McCain will be spending money like drunken sailors come the autumn.
But there are also reports from the States that General Motors is going to take the knife to its marketing budget and even Coca-Cola is going to retrench.
GM and its domestic rivals Ford and Chrysler have relied on heavily advertised promotions to shift metal for years now but the realisation has finally dawned that US consumers either don't want, or can't afford, to run SUVs and pick-ups at whatever price.
All this will impact on media stocks although most of the bad news is surely in the price of bombed-out UK media stocks.
As for Sir Martin, he'll be waiting to see if German researcher GfK makes a counter-bid for his target TNS. GfK wanted to effect a nil-premium merger with TNS until WPP stepped in with a £1.1bn cash and shares hostile bid.
Some WPP shareholders will be worried that the company has made such a big bid with global advertising growth looking as though its set to slow sharply.
Credit crunch reaches Australia
The Far East has proved mostly impervious to the credit crunch so far but it's finally reached as far as Australia. Australia's third largest bank ANZ has announced its going to write off $1bn plus in bad debts, hard on the heels of bigger rival National Australia Bank writing off a further $830m.
These are chunky amounts for what, in global terms, are quite small banks.
Of course, the Australian economy, although buoyant over the past few years, is nowhere near as big as China, Japan and India but this may be a sign that the Far East as a whole is about to embark on a period of lower growth.
If so, there'll be a mixed reaction in the rest of the world. Many global companies, such as the big marketing communications groups, have profited mightily from the region even as the US and Europe have slowed.
But a slowdown in the Far East would take more heat out of the rises in commodity prices, bringing much-needed inflation relief to economies like the UK.
BP finds itself in a Russian black comedy
The good news is that oil fell to $123 a barrel over the weekend; the bad news for BP is that its joint venture with a bunch of Russian 'oligarchs' (which accounts for a quarter of its production and a fifth of its reserves) is going from bad to worse. Because of their nature, 50/50 deals, as your accountant will tell you, are notoriously difficult to manage. But BP struck one such with Messrs Fridman, Vekselberg, Blavatnik and Khan to pipe oil from Siberia to Europe. The Russians are unhappy about BP's management of the project -- in particular its unwillingness to pay the juicy dividends they require.
BP says its staff are being harassed and has removed CEO Bob Dudley to a safe house somewhere in the UK to keep him out of the grasp of the Russian authorities.
BP chairman Peter Sutherland, a wily Irishman who used to head Goldman Sachs in Europe, has blasted the oligarchs saying that if you wish to be global capitalists play by the rules.
BP is receiving strong support from the UK government (still smarting over the assassination in London of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko), some from the US, plus backing from EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson.
The Ollys seem to be backed by former Russian president Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, and elements of the FSB, Russia's secret service.
You couldn't make it up really.
Now it's possible that the Ollys might have a point. To many outside the UK it's still seen as an arm of perfidious Albion.
But this seems to be another case of the Russians trying to claw back control over their priceless energy assets (it's Europe's biggest gas producer and has the world's second-largest oil reserves behind Saudi Arabia) from both the oligarchs (although it seems to be behind this lot, for now) and the people they did their deals with.
With the oil price finally falling the last thing anyone needs is the Russians turning off the tap.
Stephen Foster is a former news editor of ±±¾©Èü³µpk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.