Online ad spending of the top 25 US advertising companies

10 Sep

While there are companies that use nothing but online advertising, some companies still almost neglect the web. Most of these companies are the top overall advertisers. AdAge released the 2007 edition of the Top 100 US Advertising Companies (pdf, or via this html link) a while ago, but I stumbled upon it this weekend. Research documents like that always are fun to read.

It’s almost funny to see how some companies still avoid the Internet as an advertising opportunity. I took the top 25 companies (totaling a stunning $53 Billion) and listed both their advertising spending and their internet advertising spending.

# Company Total Advertising
(in billions $)		 Internet Advertising
(in billions $)		 In % of total
1 Procter & Gamble Co, 4.898 0.054 1,1%
2 AT&T 3.344 0.169 5,0%
3 General Motors Corp, 3.296 0.118 3,6%
4 Time Warner 3.088 0.091 2,9%
5 Verizon Communications 2.821 0.124 4,4%
6 Ford Motor Co, 2.576 0.099 3,8%
7 GlaxoSmithKline 2.444 0.015 0,6%
8 Walt Disney Co, 2.320 0.133 5,7%
9 Johnson & Johnson 2.290 0.034 1,5%
10 Unilever 2.098 0.028 1,3%
11 Toyota Motor Corp 1.995 0.056 2,8%
12 Sony Corp, 1.994 0.074 3,7%
13 DaimlerChrysler 1.952 0.045 2,3%
14 General Electric 1.860 0.061 3,3%
15 Sprint Nextel Corp 1.775 0.038 2,1%
16 McDonald’s Corp, 1.748 0.014 0,8%
17 Sears Holdings Corp, 1.652 0.024 1,5%
18 L’Oreal 1.456 0.008 0,5%
19 Kraft Foods 1.423 0.023 1,6%
20 Macy’s 1.361 0.005 0,3%
21 Honda Motor Co, 1.350 0.034 2,5%
22 Bank of America Corp, 1.334 0.043 3,2%
23 Nissan Motor Co, 1.328 0.029 2,2%
24 PepsiCo 1.322 0.014 1,1%
25 Nestle 1.315 0.021 1,6%
53.049 1,350.8 2,5%

Please note that it’s advertising spending in the US only, in billions of $. Hiring a web design company isn’t part of the online ad spending, for example. Banner advertising costs and Google AdWords click budgets, however, are included.

It’s almost stunning to see that four of the top 25 companies, GSK, McDonald’s, L’Oreal and Macy’s, spend less than 1% of their advertising budget online. Come on already, it’s 2007! Ok, the numbers above are last year’s, but still…
Only AT&T, Verizon and Disney spend 4% or more of their advertising budgets online.

It would have been great to dive into the online success of these companies measured by (for instance) #of Digg front page listings, StumbleUpon reviews or Del.icio.us favorites. Unfortunately, companies like P&G and Unilever each have hundreds of different brands, which would make these results inaccurate. Maybe if I had some spare hours left…

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