Nokia Case

Nokia spent £9.5m on advertising in 2010, a sharp year-on-year drop of £7.3m. The company’s ad budget has been in decline since 2007 and was £29.5m below the sector average last year.

TV gained a third of Nokia’s total spend at £3.1m, although this was £5.5m drop on its 2005 figure. The medium saw a spike in spend during the final quarter of 2010, when the company launched a number of major campaigns for its N8 smartphone in the run-up to Christmas, which celebrated the amazing things people do with Nokia technology. This shows Nokia spent a large budget on advertising its smartphones.

Press spend for last year was £3m, a 44% drop on 2005 and significantly lower that the £11.7m sector average. Cinema also saw its budget cut to £824k last year, a reduction of more than £2.8m from five years earlier.

Elsewhere, outdoor saw its £1.5m spend remain fairly steady, declining only £386k since 2005, while radio actually saw a boost in its spend to £299k, more than double its budget five years before.

Nokia’s £806k online spend mirrored the downward trend of its overall budget, decreasing each year since its £1.3m peak in 2007. The company’s investment into the medium fell by £26k on the year, although its share of Nokia’s total budget rose to 8.5% compared with 5% on 2009.

ASA

There are no complaints related to Nokia’s advertising directly. However, there were two minor complaints about TMG Company’s TV interactive commercial, which mentioned Nokia. It asked the viewers to text the answer to the company to win prizes without saying they had to use a Nokia phone.

The Smartphone Market

The smartphone’s market is the biggest single technology unit in the world. According to Gartner, the current sales of smartphones are 115 million, which only compose 20% of the overall mobile sales, and it is expected to increate to 342 by 2015. The