How's the communications industry doing? Let's take a look at the Focus reports, i.e. the gross advertising print in the first half of the year - mixed, with positive trends in TV, outdoor advertising, cinema and, of course, the "iceberg channel" online (two thirds of what the online companies like to count as "advertising spendings" is sales, public relations and simple classified ads) - all advertising media that, at least in terms of gross volume, are on the growth side - plus brochures and direct mail. In terms of advertising print volume, this adds up to a nominal 2.3 percent, according to Focus.

With the exception of online, which is exempt from the levy, the gross development can be illustrated as follows using the figures reported by Finanz on the tiresome 5 percent advertising levy:
This shrank by a full three percent in the first half of the year, which means in plain language: fewer direct mails and brochures and less "net" for placements in traditional advertising media (with the exception of online)...

However, this is only one side of the communications medal:
The fact that media spending (without taking production costs into account) only reflects part of the economic development of the communications industry - PR agencies, dialog marketers and, after all, a discrete number of digital specialists, whose services take place and are remunerated far beyond traditional media budgets, know this. Marketing managers who use online as an advertising medium state in the Focus survey that the "visible" advertising forms of display and moving images only account for just under 30 percent of the total budget for online - after email marketing, search and social media.

That's why the Advertising Climate Index, the quarterly sentiment survey of Fachverband-Werbung member companies, is a meaningful and necessary activity of the Chamber of Commerce - and the sentiment picture for the third quarter is thoroughly robustly expectant. If, however, on the basis of 97 respondents, differentiation is made into three regions and Vienna emerges as a crisis region (in contrast to the rest of Austria) - this may subjectively appear to be the case (the exhaustion of the governing personnel in the city and the federal government eventually rubs off in a doubly ugly way, to put it flippantly...), but seriously: Please try it with relevantly higher case numbers!