Blip Releases SMB Trend Data with its Blip Marketplace Index

Actionable insights on small and medium-sized business sentiment, pricing and purchasing power

Blip announces availability of its Blip Marketplace Index (Blip MI), a proprietary index reflecting purchasing trends and sentiment on Blip’s out-of-home marketplace. It is derived from millions of data points across approximately 20,000 SMB billboard budgets.

As broadcast advertising is often first to be trimmed with tightening budgets, tracking SMB billboard advertising spend can be a highly valuable, first-mover metric.

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“As the go-to marketplace for SMBs to purchase digital-out-of-home advertising, Blip has been able to track more than five years of SMB ad spend,” said Brent Thomson, CEO and co-founder at Blip. “With advertising spend being a strong indicator of business health and profitability, we are making this insight available to the masses to provide a snapshot of SMB spending within our economy, plus provide a comparative and highly correlated data point to other price indices.”

Historical Blip MI data is available for each month since January 2017 and updated data will be released the first week of each month, starting with September 2021.

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The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the Consumer Price Index (CPI) roughly the 2^nd week of each month. Business owners and investors can benefit from watching the CPI releases as a prognosticator of financial market sentiment to guide investment decisions and protect purchasing power.

The Blip Marketplace Index can give investors, SMB business owners, businesses that sell into SMBs, and others insights into:

• SMB market sentiment: optimism, pessimism, risk tolerance and aversion
• Purchasing power: budget availability/cost of capital
• Broad prices charged to customers and paid to suppliers

“Blip MI and the CPI are strongly correlated because the spending habits of SMBs are often tightly tied to the company owner’s finances,” added Thomson. “Decisions for personal and business spending are made by the same individual usually with very little latency in spending changes between the two categories.”

As the report’s release can create large-scale volatility, having a precursor index like Blip MI that is very highly correlated with the CPI could be very beneficial as a reference point.

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