are tracked by media research companies such as Nielsen, TNSMI/CMR, and Forrester. Commonly tracked measured media spending categories include television (e.g., network, spot, cable, syndicated, Spanish-language network), radio (e.g., network, national spot, local), magazines (e.g., local, Sunday magazine), business publications, newspapers (e.g., local, national), outdoor, the Yellow Pages, and the Internet (Brown et al., 2004, 2005).

Unmeasured media spending refers to the difference between a company’s reported or estimated advertising costs and its measured media spending. Unmeasured media spending includes activities such as sales promotions, coupons, direct mail, catalogs, and special events, and it is not systematically tracked (Brown et al., 2004, 2005). Marketers use a variety of techniques to assess the effects of advertising in measured media on consumers. They measure the cost of advertising or promotion, usually expressed in terms of consumer exposure to advertising messages or “impressions,” representing a message seen by one viewer. Thus, consumers who report that they remember or recall an advertisement have “retained impressions” of the specific advertisement. Marketers also track consumers’ recall, retention, processing of messages, and purchase intent or purchase behavior. A second measure of the impact of an advertisement used by marketers is the increase in sales as a result of the advertising or promotional campaign. Because several factors may influence sales in the marketplace, it may be difficult to isolate the effect of advertising on sales of a particular product during a given time period. Thus, companies and marketers use other measures to guide their decisions, including communications research, an analysis of purchase dynamics (e.g., trial purchase, repeat purchase, frequency of purchase), and tracking consumer awareness and attitudes regarding specific product categories and specific brands (Collier Shannon Scott and Georgetown Economic Services, 2005c).

Once the purchase behavior of the exposed and unexposed groups are evaluated for a pre- and post-period, marketers determine brand penetration (the percentage of households that purchased an advertised product), volume (the average number or weight of an advertised product for every 100 households), dollars spent (the average dollars spent on the advertised product for every 100 households), and the dollar share (the percentage of sales that the advertised brand represents of total category sales) (MPA, 1999).

Substantial investments have been made in marketing research directed to U.S. children and youth, and this research has grown into a major marketing tool over the past 30 years (Austin and Rich, 2001; McNeal,