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This article discusses potential legislative changes in the United States that could threaten the tax deductible status of advertising expenditure. It outlines the emergence of similar tax-based threats to advertising over recent years and discusses the work of the Association of National Advertisers and others in countering them.

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This month's Adstats features charts covering global sponsorship expenditure, including trends in global sponsorship spend, marketing spend by category, channels used in sponsorship, objectives in sponsorship evaluation and metrics used to evaluate sponsorships.

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A new study: 'Advertising Pays: how advertising fuels the UK economy' by the Advertising Association and Deloitte, undertook a statistical analysis of 17 countries over 14 years and examined the role of advertising expenditure in explaining different level of GDP. The overall conclusions are that advertising was worth 7% of GDP or £100 billion in 2011. For every £1 spent on advertising, an average of £6 was generated for the economy. Using this evidence, this article argues that advertising should be set free from government and regulator interference to be allowed to continue to be a force for economic growth. It also calls on everyone in the business to help the industry articulate what government can do, and stop doing, to help.

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This report argues that advertising adds at least £100 billion to UK GDP by increasing the level of economic activity and increasing the productivity of the economy; on average, £1 of advertising spend generates £6 for the British economy. It calculates the overall impact of advertising on the economy based on a cross-country statistical analysis covering 17 markets over 14 years. Thanks to its international reputation, UK advertising helps to export over £2 billion in advertising services each year and allows UK brands to enjoy strong international recognition, enabling the UK to export a much wider range of goods and services. As well as the direct financial effect of advertising, the research claims that increases in advertising spend boost competition, improving quality and pricing for consumers. More broadly, advertising enables businesses to deliver more innovative and higher quality products and services, plays a key role in accelerating the growth of new businesses and ideas and helps to match buyers and sellers more efficiently.

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A report from AA Lead, a marketing conference held in London, with representatives from government, media owners, clients and agencies. The main points from the day's presentations were: Advertising contributes a significant proportion of GDP – up to £100bn in the case of the UK, but the nature of adspend is changing fast, with mobile spend expanding rapidly. That said, there is still value to be had in tried-and-true traditional media. Companies are still reducing budgets, but are making the remaining budget work harder. Across all campaigns, the data suggest that spending money on ads has a payback of 6:1 for the broader economy.

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Total online advertising spend in New Zealand for Q4, 2012 was $98.62m, an increase from last quarter of 5% and up 12% from 2011. Mobile achieved the strongest growth in Q4, 2012, almost doubling advertising spend. Display bounced back this quarter by 12% while Search & Directories grew by 5%, with both channels experiencing their largest quarter of spend to date. Classifieds experienced a slight decrease of 1.5% on Q3, however compared to 2011 this channel experienced growth of 22%. The top four highest spending industry categories represented 42% of total Display spend. These were Investment, Finance and Banking; Travel and Accommodation; Food and Beverages; and Government departments, Services and Communities.

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Much of the confrontational efforts in the last four decades regarding the reduction of alcohol consumption have focused on the advertising of alcohol beverages. Critics of alcohol beverage advertising argue that the amount and substance of the alcohol advertising results in increased consumption of those beverages. A good deal of the research that supports this viewpoint utilises either cross-sectional data or controlled experiments, and identifies advertising as one of the possible factors influencing alcohol consumption. Using time-series analyses, this manuscript examines the relationship between distilled spirits advertising expenditures and consumption in the US from 1971 to 2008 on an aggregate and brand level. This four-decade period is especially interesting because it includes a decade in which the spirits industry ended a voluntary ban of advertising on electronic media.

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The June 2011 edition of Macroeconomic Foresights, the Global MONITOR Quarterly Update, takes an in-depth look at the middle class: what defines it, where it is growing globally (Asia Pacific) and shrinking (Europe, North America), and consumption trends such as desire for thrift and security. A report examines the economic prognosis for the US, UK, Germany, Japan, China, India, Russia, France, Italy and Brazil, analysing the impact of global events such as Eurozone instability, the Japan tsunami, tighter monetary policies and rising oil prices.

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Governments throughout the developed world are examining ways to cut the giant public-sector budget deficits that have opened up following the financial crisis of 2008-2009. It is widely hoped that a combination of budget cuts and re-emerging economic growth will reduce the problem to manageable dimensions. This paper suggests that policies dependent on a re-emergence of economic growth to manage deficit situations may in many cases be over-optimistic, because economic growth is likely to be very low in many OECD countries over the next decade. Moreover, government forecasts for growth are frequently too high and World Bank data shows that the average rate of real economic growth has been following a largely unrecognised falling trend in developed markets since the 1950s.

Summary
This June, 2009 article looks into the state of the U.S. economy, and discusses the implications for consumer spending. Credit card defaults are seen to be rising, though delinquency rates are down, suggesting that defaults might fall in the medium term. Still more importantly, unemployment is on the increase. The economy as a whole is seen as "bouncing along the bottom". Businesses are advised to maintain, or increase, their marketing spend, even if they are suffering in the recession; spending cuts are seen as potentially very damaging to the firm over the long term. Marketers are also urged to focus on product guarantees rather than low prices, reflecting customer concerns about wasting their money on products which do not work.