Pick up the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell and you will discover how buying decisions are made in the blink of an eye, before consumers even realize they're making a decision. He suggests that "we think without thinking." Gladwell urges that people make decisions through rapid cognition and a concept known as thin-slicing, - the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. More than we realize, we evaluate a situation or a brand and frame our response before we ever consciously think about it. I'm going along with that reasoning the next time I take a big bite out of a DQ Buster bar!

In 2010, Political advertising was up a whopping 535.7% in Chicago. Putting that aside, there were (3) other categories of business that made a nice splash into Chicago media in 2010. They were:

  

1) Oil & Gas - +47.6%

2) Financial Services - +19.1%

3) Automotive - +15%

  

My initial thought for the Oil & Gas increase had been higher gasoline prices allowed companies like BP, Shell and ExxonMobil to put those nice profits back into advertising. Taking a closer look though, BP's increase in advertising was very significant - a 63% increase - spending over 6 million dollars into the marketplace! The next closest competitor in the category - Citgo - spent a little more than 1.5 million. Looking at their ad spending, BP spent almost 5 million dollars in newspaper...after not spending a single penny in print during 2009. Their strategy was to do damage control on the BP oil spill assuring everyone that they were doing everything in their power to stop the Gulf Oil spill. They combated the front page negative p.r. w/ full page caring ads inside. My guess is by the end of 2011 BP will be back to 2009 levels when they spent 3.8 million in the marketplace.