Lots of complaining about the advertising stats.
The (Direct) Marketing association says it spent $400m on creative and the reported $100m was just postage, the Internet Advertising Bureau says the $65m online spend excluded search (i.e. Google) and the long tail of smaller sites, and MediaEdge said that un-addressed mailouts were under-reported.
The Direct Marketing production costs are not included, I guess, as the cost of producing other advertising is also not included: newspapers, TV and their ilk only report how much money they earn from advertising, not how much the client spent on production costs. It would be really interesting to include those costs, but hard (and scary) to count. Advertising agencies would have to be the source, so how about it?
The Internet Advertising Bureau has only itself to blame for the under-reporting of online spend. Every other industry with more than 3 players manages to self-report, so why has the most technologically advanced industry failed?
Same with un-addressed mailouts – all of the industry just has to report the results, and if there is a surge then we should see it in the numbers.
Interesting the the NZHerald chose to headline the article ‘Media Feel the Pinch from Advertisers‘, when the real story was ‘TV and Newspapers Lose out to Online and Radio‘.
Lance Wiggs 