On Tuesday 12 November we ran a story headlined P&G, GM and Unilever Are World’s Top Ad Spenders, quoting figures related to global advertising expenditure.
In keying the data, we inadvertently juxtaposed a comma with a decimal point, thereby multiplying each figure by one thousand.
Procter & Gamble, for example, whose annual global adspend in 2001 reached $3.8201billion, was wrongly listed as $3,820.1 billion – on the high side even for P&G, as many readers have pointed out! This error was replicated with the other nine companies mentioned in the story.
For those who downloaded the full table of data from AdAge, please note that this was unaffected by our error.
Red-faced, we thank those readers who took time to email us – some with richly deserved wryness. To all concerned, our apologies for the inaccuracies, now corrected for future access via the WAMN archives.
Peter Scott-Smith, Managing Editor
