Themes of Issue 01/2009

Joachim Büschken

The efficiency of advertising is an age-old question in marketing. Do marketers spend too much on advertising, or too little? Is it really true, as John Wanamaker put it more than eighty years ago, that half of advertising spending is wasted, but we don’t know which half? How do we know without actually measuring the efficiency of advertising? Data envelopment analysis offers a new chance to answer these questions.