Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Drew Crum with Stifel Nicolaus.
Drew Crum - Stifel Nicolaus
A two-part question for you on the costs -- your advertising spend is running down nearly 50% year-to-date and based on your fourth quarter guidance, you are forecasting at least 12% revenue growth. I wonder if you could help us out -- any quantification around advertising spend in the fourth quarter given you are projecting a 40% decline in operating expenses. And I guess along those lines, the operating expenses came in slightly lower than your guidance for the third quarter and you are now projecting as a I mentioned a 40% decline in the fourth quarter. I think you were originally looking at a 35% decline so I just want to know what the change is there.
William B. Chiasson
Let me address a few of those -- first is on the ad spend. You’re right -- in the first nine months, we have taken down our advertising spend quite a bit for a few reasons. One of them is we put a lot more focus on retail promotion to make sure that price points were where they needed to be at retail and we were getting the right reflection at retail required to move the product.
You know, as we’ve talked about all year, we see that in this year with the consumer being very price conscious, that’s a very important priority for us, so a lot more of our investment and our investment will continue to be there, has gone into the retail trade promotions, which of course does not show up on the advertising line.
We do see a step up in our commitment to communications to the consumer advertising in the fourth quarter and we see that the number of times we will actually be talking to those consumers will go up for our key products, especially for Leapster and Tag. The cost of that is significantly less this year than last year, as you probably are aware as well, so the cost to get to those TRPs is nowhere near where the same cost was a year ago before the ?Great Recession?, so I think those are two key things to remember -- one is our strategy is a bit different this year than going to last and the other is we are able to reach a lot of people. Also, the third factor there is last year was a heavy launch year for us and so we were communicating new products, especially at the end of the second quarter going well into the third quarter. And this year we are of course focusing on the holiday season.
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