Intermedia Substitutability and Market Demand by National Advertisers

We assess substitutable and complementary relationships among eight national advertising media classes, as well as the magnitude of their own-price elasticities. We use a translog demand model, whose parameters we estimate by three-stage least squares, based on 1960-94 annual U.S. data.We find aggregate demand by national advertisers for each of the eight media is own-price inelastic, and that cross-price elasticities suggest slightly more substitute than complementary relationships, although both are rather weak. These patterns are consistent with long prevailing institutional arrangements and media selection practices.