Benchmarking Advertising Efficiency
Xueming LuoState University of New York andNaveen DonthuGeorgia State University
While the top 100 U.S advertisers spent 64 billion dollars on advertising in 1998, an increase of 6.87 percent over the previous year (Advertising Age, May 3, 1999), advertising accountability is in question. Not only is it difficult to link advertising to sales, but the efficiency of advertising in creating sales and profits is now under question. Efficiency, based on the engineering productivity concept, is generally defined as the ratio of outputs to inputs. For example, in the advertising area, input...