On the Schwerin Analyses of Advertising Effectiveness

This article is a critique of reported analyses relating market shares to both advertising expenditure and measures of the Schwerin system of testing TV commercials. Technical difficulties are found with the particular data and analyses procedures, and with the claimed interpretations. The observed association between the Schwerin test measures and market shares is weak, and quite generally the broad kind of data analysed is irrelevant to the question of whether the Schwerin system is valid or not.