This year, for the second time, the market research institute Marketmind conducted the largest study of advertising spending by Austrian companies on behalf of Austrian Post. Austrian Post published the results today in its Dialog Marketing Report 2015.

This shows that the use of the various advertising channels has remained relatively constant compared with the previous year, but that overall advertising expenditure has increased. Traditional advertising in newspapers and magazines and TV advertising accounted for the largest share of advertising expenditure in 2014, at EUR 3.5 billion. This was followed by events with EUR 1.3 billion, EUR 1.1 billion for dialog marketing in print, and around EUR 520 million for online advertising. The total of 6.4 billion euros that companies spend on advertising,
represent an increase of seven percent over the previous year. "Competitive pressure has increased in many sectors, precisely because of the weak economic situation. You can see this clearly in retail, where there is strong cut-throat competition. In such situations, people tend to invest more rather than less in communication," says Dipl.-Wi.-Ing. Dr. Gereon Friederes, Managing Director of marketmind GmbH, explaining the increasing investment in advertising.

The study also clearly shows that the biggest shifts occurred in the online sector. For example, there was a massive increase in paid social media advertising (expenditure of around EUR 27 million, +53%) and own websites (expenditure of around EUR 157 million, +42%). By contrast, only 26 million euros were spent on newsletters (-31%). What seems surprising, however, is that especially in online marketing there is often no evaluation of success.

Although online marketing can be expected to continue to grow, multi-channel communication in particular is becoming increasingly important. Walter Hitziger, Member of the Management Board of Österreichische Post AG responsible for Mail, Advertising Mail & Branch Offices, is convinced that the only way to achieve business success is through sustainable customer dialog in the online and offline areas. What the report clearly shows is that direct customer contact and customer loyalty programs are still on the rise. "Anyone who succeeds in constantly encouraging existing and potential customers to engage with their own brand, offers and innovations on different advertising channels can count on their advertising efforts having an impact. With this second Dialog Marketing Report, we at Swiss Post are showing that we take the developments in dialog marketing processes seriously and are leading the way in the direct customer approach segment - now and in the future," says Hitziger.

Study Design

500 companies from the industrial/manufacturing, trade, construction, services and retail sectors with 10 or more employees were surveyed. Larger companies were disproportionately represented in the survey (disproportionate sampling). The survey was conducted in the form of telephone interviews (CATI) in the period from January to February 2015.