The present study aims to evaluate the advertising spending efficiency of 17 FMCG firms for the time period of seven years from 2006 to 2012. The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique is used to evaluate the efficiencies in terms of Overall Technical Efficiency (OTE), Pure Technical Efficiency (PTE) and Scale Efficiency (SE) for each firm in different years. The analysis reveals that on an average, almost 6% of the companies in terms of OTE and 22% firms in terms of PTE efficiently utilize their advertising expenditure. The analysis also reveals that the analyzed companies, on an average, need to reduce their inputs by almost 50% while maintaining their current levels of outputs in order to become efficient.

Advertising is a significant aspect of marketing strategies. Effective advertising is necessary to get the positive corresponding demand from the customer at a profitable price (Hadad et al., 2005). Advertising by itself cannot be bad or good as it is just a tool, which can have beneficial results or negative impact (Nagendra and Agrawal, 2011).

The urge for advertising is simply because of the need to sell and so it is necessary that the prospective buyers be informed. The advent of the new technology has altered the trend of traditional one-way flow of information to real-time interactive sessions where consumers or the prospective buyers have also become a part of the process. Users are now getting empowered to choose, instead of being fed forcefully with the advertisement (Shukla et al., 2012).

Management Research Journal, Advertising Media Efficiency, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), FMCG Firms, Pure Technical Efficiency (PTE), Scale Efficiency (SE), Empirical Investigation, Overall Technical Efficiency (OTE), Data Envelopment Analysis.