Abstract:

Press schedules need to be assessed in two respects. The first and most obvious of these is the question whether or not the money available has been disposed in the most efficient way, having regard to the advertising objectives. The technique described in this paper usually produces no more than marginal, but often still worthwhile, improvements compared with conventional methods and the likelihood is that no substantial progress is possible without better media data. The second aspect is the much larger question of how much needs to be spent to achieve a given purpose. Rule of thumb calculations of advertising expenditure as a proportion of turnover are now widely recognised to be irrelevant and misleading as a guide to arriving at an allocation and many advertisers are making some headway in deducing more complex and logically sound empirical relationships between sales and advertising. Some of this work looks very convincing and there is every reason to pursue this approach as vigorously as possible.