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This paper looks at how over the past 14 years we have seen the licensing business grow from a small almost cottage industry into the multi million dollar marketing operation today. Licensed properties are now one of the tools which many FMCG brands and products use to create new products and/or increase sales for existing ones. In fact there is a genre of products that rely solely on the licenced property as the main marketing proposition to gain distribution and sales based on the strength of the licence. We have seen businesses as diverse as BT (with their ET adverts) through publishing, especially children's magazines (Sorry, but Roy of the Rovers doesn't cut any ice any more!) to petrol companies and greeting cards. It is undeniable that the use of a licenced property is a very very powerful tool in the armoury of a brand manager. In addition, many brands and companies also like to use licences tactically and ‘rent’ in licenced properties in key periods of the year to give their brands a ‘sales boost’. This is more a short‐term relationship but still ongoing as the brands use licences regularly. Some companies such as McDonalds and Nestle have gone further by purchasing the rights to all Disney properties exclusively for their categories and become ‘preferred partners’. The cost of the purchase of these licences is often not small and a brand that buys into a licence that fails to deliver is an expensive and costly business. It is often said that choosing a licenced property is an art and one in which there is little or no guarantee of success.

Fisher’s amount of information is the most parametric measure in the literature of statistics. However, not for every family of probability density functions do the well‐known regularity assumptions hold. To avoid this problem, several parametric measures have been proposed on the basis of divergence measures. In this work, parametric measures of information are obtained on the basis of the generalized Jensen difference divergence measures. When the regularity assumptions hold, their relations with Fisher’s amount of information are also studied.

This monograph presents a thorough examination of the phenomena of “threshold” levels of advertising activity and the “wearout’ of advertisements and/or campaigns. These are seen as corresponding to the management questions “How little can we spend/How infrequently can we advertise?” and “How much is too much/How infrequently is too little?” In the first section the relevant literature on, or related to, the two issues is reviewed. Section 2 describes a survey aimed at establishing current beliefs in the existence of the phenomena, the practices resulting from these beliefs, and the data which support them. Finally, Section 3 offers an overview on the managerial issues involved in decisions concerning threshold or wearout risks in advertising. It is suggested that wasted expenditure may be occurring in advertising because the believed levels of threshold and wearout are both too high.