A quick take on the biggest advertisers, brands and agencies. Amazon, Comcast and Procter & Gamble top Ad Age Datacenter’s rankings of the largest U.S. advertisers. Amazon and Alibaba top the rankings of global advertisers. Want to dig deeper? Click on the links below.
Datacenter
Top marketers, brands and agencies, ranked—The Big List
Ad Age Datacenter's rankings of the largest U.S. and global advertisers and agencies. Updated: Global advertisers rankings
U.S. advertisers
Ad Age's roster of the Leading National Advertisers in 2021 scored the second-biggest spending gain on record, an extraordinary turnaround from the pandemic plunge in 2020. The top 200 U.S. advertisers increased ad and marketing services spending in 2021 by 19.7% to a record $196 billion. The top 100—the true blue chips of brands and budgets—boosted spending 19.5%. That’s just below the 20.0% growth for the top 100 seen in 1976, which was the fastest growth since Ad Age began producing its annual marketers report in 1956.
10 biggest U.S. advertisers
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Most-advertised brands
Ad Age Datacenter ranked Geico as the nation’s most-advertised brand in 2021 with measured-media spending of $1.45 billion. Amazon came in second place in 2021 after taking the top spot in 2020.
10 most-advertised brands in U.S.
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© Copyright 2022 Crain Communications Inc.
Global advertisers
Spending for the world’s 100 biggest advertisers surged 22.1% to a record $339 billion in 2021, rebounding from a 7.1% decline in 2020. That’s far and away the biggest percentage growth since Ad Age began ranking marketers based on worldwide spending in 2001. Among the world’s 100 biggest advertisers, 91 increased spending in 2021 vs. 2020, when ad spending fell amid a brief but brutal global recession precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
10 biggest worldwide advertisers
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Source: Ad Age World's Largest Advertisers 2022 (December 2022). Numbers rounded.
© Copyright 2022 Crain Communications Inc.
Agency companies and networks
Organic growth for the five biggest legacy agency holding companies—WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic and Dentsu—surged in 2021 as the ad market recovered following a sharp drop in 2020. Organic growth for those five major agency companies jumped in 2021 by an average of 9.6% in the U.S. and 11.5% worldwide. Organic growth strips out acquisitions, divestitures and the effects of exchange rates.
The rebound in 2021 means all five companies except for Omnicom had fully recovered from a 2020 worldwide decline in business based on positive worldwide two-year compound organic growth for 2020-2021 vs. pre-pandemic 2019. The average of 2022 worldwide organic growth forecasts for the five companies came in at about 5%, with comparatively little variance among the companies.
Digital-centric consultancies led by Accenture Interactive (rebranded as Accenture Song in April 2022) top Ad Age Datacenter's ranking of the largest agency networks.
10 biggest agency companies and 10 biggest agency networks
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Agency ventures
U.S. revenue for agencies from all disciplines jumped by 13.5% in 2021, the fastest growth since 2000. The 2021 rebound followed a 6.8% drop in 2020, which was the second-biggest drop since Ad Age began publishing the Agency Report in 1945. The sharpest decline (-7.5%) came in 2009 amid the Great Recession.
Biggest agency ventures by category
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Dig deeper
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Ad Age Leading National Advertisers
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Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers
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Ad Age Agency Report
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