According to data on the French advertising market reported by autoactu.com, vehicle manufacturers increased their advertising budgets by 1% in 2003 while their sales dropped 6.3%.

Overall advertising costs per new car unit rose to €670, within a range from €370/unit for Peugeot to €1,290/unit for Toyota France. Toyota is said to have increased its marketing spend by 7% over the past five years, to a total now exceeding that of Ford, VW and Fiat, which actually reduced their expenditure last year, devoting some 25% of their budgets to radio advertising.

Among importers to the French market, Opel led the field by spending €49m on TV, while Peugeot spent €50m, and Opel also spent four times as much as the year before on the national daily press.

Manufacturers' spending on Internet advertising advanced by 66%, with Citroen increasing its own by 40% and VW increasing its online budget by 28%, to become the manufacturer spending the largest part of its marketing budget online – 5.8% against an industry average of 2.8/%. Renault, which spent 5% or €13.4m of its total marketing budget on the Internet became France's fourth biggest Internet advertiser among all categories.

Comparable advertising expenditure figures are seldom available for the UK market.