Wal-Mart, Unilever, McDonald’s and others, according to this story in Ad Age, are reaping “an improved bang for the buck on their media in the last quarter, or say they will do so this year”
The prime suspect behind the increased efficiency is weak pricing in some media and markets, though there may be other reasons as well.
Wal-Mart, for example, reduced its advertising costs 20% compared to last year, mainly because of lower media costs. But its share of voice rose 67%.
The company didn’t speculate on whether that SOV increase was helped by some of Wal-Mart’s competitors cutting their spending to near zero.
Procter & Gamble, too, extracted more efficiency from its ad buys. It said spending as a percent of sales dropped 2.4% last quarter, while global ad impressions edged up 5%.
P&G’s chaiman and CEO wouldn’t commit to that 5% number in a conference call, however, merely saying he thought in a lot of cases P&G was building its share of voice.
There’s that reference to SOV again.
The lesson: Maintain or increase your ad impressions during a downswing in the economy. You’ll be rewarded with higher SOV as competitors slash their spending. And that could translate to increased SOM (share of market).
Tags: ad impressions, media spending
