At 08:07 AM 4/13/00 , you wrote:
>Out of curiosity, did the people presenting this study compare
>advertising/marcom spend directed at those magazines on a per-vendor
>basis? Last figure I heard for Microsoft was a $1Bn annual advertising/-
>marcom budget, which is huge by any measure. Yank Microsoft's ads, and
>Ziff-Davis quite possibly goes bust, or at least downsizes drastically.
The size of the spending seems much less relevant than changes in the level
of spending. If the reviews improved as the products improved, but the
relative amounts of ad spending by MSFT remained about the same, your
concern could be set aside.
I do not have the data to decide this, except for the fairly worthless
anecdotal data based on my memories of reading several computer magazines.
I don't recall a relative increase in MS ads. If anything, with more
computer hardware and software companies spending on ads I think the
relative importance of MS's ads dropped.
Also, not all the power here is on MS's side. If they refused to advertized
in all of Ziff-Davis's publications, they would be screwing themselves badly.
Max
Max More, Ph.D.
President, Extropy Institute. www.extropy.org
CEO, MoreLogic Solutions. www.maxmore.com
max@maxmore.com or more@extropy.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:09:18 MDT