Ad revenues quoted out of context can be confusing for general public
I am writing in response to the heated discussions generated by a front page report ("Winners and losers as ad spend up 65pc in 5 years", November 18).
AdmanGo is a professional market research company specialising in media monitoring. We manually sort through all advertisements published in Hong Kong in various media on a daily basis. With every advertisement, we record its publication date, title, page number, colour and size or channel, airtime and duration if it's on TV, in order to match it with the media's published rate card. This practice is endorsed and used by all market research and media monitoring firms worldwide.
In practice, everyone in the industry knows that media space can be bought with huge discounts varying from 20 per cent to 95 per cent off the rate card rate. The discount each advertiser receives depends on the volume of purchase, agency used and package buys. Agencies, media owners, and advertisers understand this monitoring methodology well, and would apply different discount assumptions to "monitored adspend", based on "actual adspend" known by that company.
As you can see, none of these figures was provided to the SCMP directly by admanGo. When different companies quote adspend data from the same source, but with different discount factors estimated by different companies, it causes confusion.