For livestock product, if you have enough market share, your brand loyalty will be enough to sustain your brand rating without ads. And I don't trust AI COO to mess with my optimize setting anyway, I always do them manually.

even for the richest cities; concern for livestock products are like; %40-%45 quality, %40-%45 price, %10-%15 brand.
for "poor" cities the brand concern is around %5
most of the time it just doesnt worth to advertise those products unless you own the media firm, and by then it wouldn't be a big concern at that point of the game since the effect would be minimal.
there are just many other profitable options to invest.

I think this depends on your COO's personality, whether he likes spending on advertising or not.. He's personality might be low in this matter.

But then, i think that more control to COO is essential. It's annoying that whenever you don't have a CMO, your COO acts like the CMO and changes advertising expenses and links and there is no way to control the COO in changing this.

I suggest that CMO and CTO options should be added to the COO options.

My CMO does not want to advertise my livestock products even when im paying him around 100mil $ a year. When i manually link advertising unit to sales unit, he will unlink it.

[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-9iObmbHmFQc/U7lem6291FI/AAAAAAAAEr8/5O9dQPDBXj8/s767/_livestock_brand_bug.png[/img]

You can see it in my savegame file i uploaded in [url=http://www.capitalismlab.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1982]this[/url] thread.


Also i'm not sure about this: is your advertising unit working when not linked to sales unit?