From the "what took you so long" category, GlobalSpec recently released a report on the marketing spending habits of B2B industrial suppliers & manufacturing companies. (reported on my eMarketer) Not surprisingly, they're going to be spending more online. Yeah for those of us in the online industry.

Some other interesting findings from the report...

...70% of respondents indicated that either customer acquisition or lead generation is their primary
marketing goal in 2006

...Budgets for online marketing continue to increase, with 35% of respondents saying that they will
spend upwards of 50% of their 2006 marketing budget online

...93% of respondents indicated they will spend more or the same on marketing in 2006 than 2005

What did surprise me was that a huge percentage of the spend would be on "directories and websites". Directories? I guess that's what keeps the folks over at Thomas Register in business. They saw it coming when they went 100% online. Must be good news for them.

I guess this really isn't all that surprising if you buy into the rationale that the buyer behavior in these markets has progressed along w/ the marketing behavior - then doing directory placement buys is perfectly logical.