Determinants of advertising expenditures: aggregate and cross-media evidence

Advertising expenditures account for 1 per cent of developed country GDP, having grown at an average real rate of 5 per cent p.a. over the 1980s. Trends in New Zealand have been similar to trends overseas. Hence analysis of the determinants of advertising in New Zealand should assist understanding of the determinants of advertising expenditures in other developed countries. We discuss changes in NZ's advertising industry and use a multi-equation co-integration framework to model the determinants of NZ advertising expenditure, both in total and across different media. We find that expenditure on advertising in all media is strongly pro-cyclical, that the allocation of expenditures depends on circulation patterns, and that press and magazines are complementary media and are substitutes for TV advertising.