Talk about talking their book! International Data Group, publisher of Computerworld and myriad other computer publications, has just received the results of a study by Stat Resources Inc, Boston, which tried to correlate computer advertising density to sales by dividing 43 companies into three groups by the percentage of their sales invested in print advertising: the study suggests that high density advertisers, those that spent 4.5% or more of their total sales on advertising, experienced a growth in revenues of more than double that of low density advertisers that spent less than 1% of their sales on advertising; the study also found – surprise, surprise – that computer trade advertising is more effective than advertising in general business publications; IDG says that more than 90 econometric models were tested to find the model that best explained the relationship between advertising in computer against general business publications and the effect on sales growth; a database of information on computer company advertising in 50 computer publications and nine business publications was created, based on data provided by Adscope, supplemented with sales and earnings data on 43 big public computer firms for the years 1988 to 1990.
