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I spoke to Samantha Silberberg, integrated marketing manager, and Patrick McIntee, senior marketing manager, in The Economist Group’s integrated marketing department about the top

Advertisers are creating their own content in-house, and requesting it from media companies. So much of advertising today is about relinquishing control of brand image, but white-label content [content produced by media companies that advertisers rebrand to appear as their own] allows them to provide information that is valuable to readers while creating a positive brand image.

The truth is that many advertisers lack the time, skills, expertise and resources to produce effective white-label content. There is also still distrust from audiences towards companies that are not already content providers offering content.

he would have to "moderate" his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be "more efficient" than the traditional media that usually eats the lion's share of P&G's ad budget.This is coming from the man who increased P&G's adspend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.

Note that P&G's revenues were up 4 percent to $22 billion in the quarter but the company's costs for sales, general and administrative work were flat.

n the call, McDonald and his crew were asked about ad costs three different times. McDonald eventually said: As we've said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we're quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available. In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.