The budget balance - advertising versus research

Tom Harper, managing director of ACNielsen Ireland, and Michael Cluff, international managing director of Media Audits, analyse the ESOMAR data on per capita adspend and expenditure on market research by country.

The budget balance – advertising versus research

Tom Harper and Michael Cluff

Over the years we have always been puzzled by companies' approach to setting budgets in these two areas – advertising (large) and market research (small). Our curiosity was piqued further by the September 2005 issue of ESOMAR's Research World(1), where some very interesting statistics were published. They list the top 50 market research countries along with adspend and per capita adspend. In 2004 the top 50 spent $385 billion on advertising. The largest four markets, the US, Germany, Japan and the UK, account for...

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