Evaluating advertising efficieny using a dynamic DEA approach

We focus on measuring the efficiency of advertising media spending, an impor-tant marketing issue that has recently been discussed also by using a Data Envel-opment Analysis (DEA) approach. The relevant implications of DEA for marketing research in the area of consumer, managerial and marketing models are emphasized for example in Luo (2004). Recent papers address the problem of measuring the efficiency of advertising. Luo and Donthu (Luo and Donthu 2001, 2005) apply DEA and Stochastic Frontier Technique to determine the efficient advertisers among the top 100 U.S. advertisers in 1997 and 1998; Färe et al. (2004) use DEA techniques to estimate the overall cost efficiency in advertising and optimal mix of advertising media considering a set of firms of the same industry (beer industry, namely) during the decade 1983-1993. Like Luo and Donthu we aim at analyzing the efficiency of the leading US adver-tisers, but our focus is on the evolution of advertising spending efficiency. We con-sider 70 leading U.S. advertisers from 2001 to 2006, data are collected from the yearl