Departament d'Economia de l'Empresa European Doctoral Programme in Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management Research Work ASSESSING ADVERTISING EFFICIENCY: DOES INTERNET PLAY A ROLE?

In line with one of the top research priorities in the field of marketing nowadays, this paper focuses on assessing the efficiency of advertising. The application of a Data Envelopment Analysis to a sample of 17 companies from the Spanish automobile industry revealed that there is a room for improving the efficiency of advertising expenditures, as advertising inefficiency was around 20%. However, online advertising was found to affect positively the efficiency. Stochastic frontier analysis using three year panel data corroborates this finding, revealing significant positive relationship between on-line advertising and sales. The research also gives support to the need o