Budzinski/Wacker: Springer-ProSiebenSat.1-Merger
18
BILD, it is not self-evident that the percentage of readers, who decides to read a dif-
ferent newspaper, is prone to switch to BILD once the frequency of BILD advertising
spots on P7S1 increases. While the Bundeskartellamt (2006: 46-49) engages in a gen-
eral analysis demonstrating that overlaps between the readers of BILD and the view-
ers of P7S1 exist, it refrains from analysing the willingness of non-BILD-readers to
switch to BILD. The switching elasticity might be considerably low due to an explic-
itly deliberate decision of these readers to avoid BILD because of its political bias
and controversial journalistic methods (Kuchinke/Schubert 2006: 483).
The context of price discrimination and conglomerate markets represents to some
extent a media-specific complex of problems, which is not particularly well analysed
in economics. Standard economic theory on price discrimination generally relates
more to vertical relations. Thus, in summary, while additional economic analysis
along the outlined lines could have been helpful for clarification, the assessment of
the Bundeskartellamt does not stand in contrast to a ‘more-economic focused’ per-
spective.
3.2.2 Content-related Cross-Promotion
Besides these promotional measures, similar effects could be achieved in a more indi-
rect way through editorial measures (Bundeskartellamt 2006: 53-58). In contrast to
the promotional measures of the previous section, the corporate media are not pro-
moted through TV spots or advertisements but within the edited content. It can be
assumed that advertising hidden in editorial content attracts higher attention and repu-
tation than frequent TV spots (that could easily be avoided by zapping to other sta-
tions) (Gounalakis/Zagouras 2006: 1625-1626). A coherent cross-media content
strategy, e.g. complementing and escorting each other’s ‘stories’, could enhance con-
sumer loyalty and induce P7S1-viewers to buy BILD in order to see how the story
continues to unfold. Furthermore, established brand names, like “BILD”, could also
be used to launch a TV show called “BILD TV”, the profitability of which is elabo-
rately discussed in the Bundeskartellamt decision, finding enhanced incentives to
launch such a show post-merger.
In the academic controversy accompanying the merger prohibition, Bohne (2006:
545) and Sacker (2006) raise doubts whether journalistic cross-promotion would
automatically strengthen AS’s dominant position on the newspapers reader market,
referring to deviating consumer behaviour in regard to the two different media news-
papers and TV as well as to adverse reactions of consumers that well realise the
common background of the conglomerate. Even if one accepts the prospects of cross-
promotion, however, it does not suffice to find that a merger creates scope for profit-
able business strategies. Quite the contrary, one would expect higher profitability to
be both major motivation and major benefit (efficiency gains) of mergers. It becomes
the decisive issue whether the profitable strategy decreases or enhances consumer
welfare. Therefore, from a more-economic approach perspective, the relevant ques-
tion is not merely whether cross-promotion is “commercially reasonable” (Bundeskar-