The newspaper of record–The New York Times–reported Monday that hospital spending on advertising is up over 20% for the first six months of 2011. And who says there’s no good news?
Let’s put the story in perspective.
The report says spending was $717 million for the first half of the year. If you double that to estimate an annual figure, then total hospital spending on advertising would be $1.43 billion for all of 2011.
In 2010 total expenditures in the nation’s hospitals was approximately $800 billion, which means spending on advertising by hospitals approximates .0018 of revenues (using last year’s revenue projection).
I wonder how many other consumer-oriented industries spend only 18 cents for every hundred dollars of revenue on their advertising and marketing?