Whenever discussing the digital ad industry, or advertising in general, many stats come out about how many billions of dollars are spent each year in one area or another. These huge numbers can be quite interesting, but they can also be very overwhelming. After all, when most marketers are looking into buying advertisement space they are looking at spending hundreds or thousands of dollars at a time, not millions or billions. It can be hard to imagine where all this money is coming from.
Of course, much of the revenue within the advertising world comes from the sheer numbers of smaller marketers. If you have a million people spending $1000 per year, for example, it can add up quite quickly. There are some companies and agencies, however, that single handedly spend many billions.
The world’s largest advertising agency holding firm, which is “WPP,” recently made news by signing an advertising deal with BuzzFeed. While the specifics of the deal are not released, rumors suggest that the annual spend from WPP to BuzzFeed will be somewhere just under $100 Million. With this news came some additional reports concerning how much WPP is spending and where it is going. The numbers are quite impressive.
First, WPP spends approximately $76 Billion on advertising each year. That alone is amazing. When you look at their list of where they invest the most money you’ll see that it is on some of the more popular ad platforms. The #1 spot goes to Google, which receives $3 Billion per year from WPP. This is spread out over display, search, mobile and video. Next is News Corp, which owns TV stations like Fox and others. News Corp gets $2.5 Billion.
Facebook is growing quickly on their list, hitting the $1 Billion per year mark. Yahoo gets $430 Million, AOL $130 million and Twitter $120 Million.
The amazing thing is that all of this ad spend is coming from one main holding company. Of course, that holding company makes ad purchases for a huge number of other companies. None the less, it is easy to see how they can influence the ad industry quite significantly and knowing about what they are doing can help other marketers to understand what can be most successful.
