Advertiser Tracker · core data as of 2026-09-27 · latest event 2026-08-06
The marketing money map
Follow the money through the whole marketing economy, from primary sources only.
Part 1: what the biggest advertisers actually spend — and how it has grown since 2019.
Part 2: the pivot — budgets grew, but not evenly, so who captured the growth? Part 3:
the sell-side — the revenue and margins of the agencies, platforms, adtech and martech firms that
get paid, with what their leadership tells investors. Every number is a company's own filing; every
quote is verbatim from a results release or earnings call.
Part 1 · The buy-side
Last year, most of the biggest advertisers raised spend again — and most are spending a bigger share of revenue than pre-pandemic
Disclosed advertising / marketing expense from SEC filings (10-K XBRL), one consistent
line-item per company. Nominal dollars being up since 2019 is unremarkable; the two questions that matter
are what they did last year and whether spend is growing faster than the business (intensity).
The split: classic brand advertisers are leaning in; the tech giants' intensity is falling because revenue
is outgrowing marketing.
Last fiscal year, company by company
Change in disclosed spend, latest fiscal year vs. the year before. Under each name: how
today's spend-as-%-of-revenue compares with 2019 — +pp = leaning in (spend outgrew the business),
−pp = riding growth. One receipt worth savoring: P&G trimmed spend the same year it told investors
"total reach tripled despite a 20% reduction in media spend."
The longer arc — growth vs. 2019
Ranked by percent change, latest fiscal year vs. 2019. (Amex began disclosing in 2020.)
Marketing intensity — spend as % of revenue
How hard each advertiser leans on marketing: latest-year disclosed spend ÷ same-year revenue,
both from the same filing. Travel marketplaces run ~25–30% — but note the denominator: OTA revenue is a
take-rate on bookings, so marketing is effectively their cost of goods. On gross bookings, Booking pegs the
same spend at just 4.4% (its CFO's own framing, quoted below). CPG runs ~10–11%; retail under 1%. † Financial
firms' ASC-606 revenue tags can exclude interest income, narrowing the denominator; Capital One's is
fee-income-only, so its ratio is suppressed as not meaningful. Click any card for a company's intensity trend.
The whole market — the most marketing-intense public companies
The same question asked of every U.S. filer, not just our panel: all companies that
tagged advertising/marketing expense in SEC XBRL for CY2025 (1,900+ filers), joined to same-year revenue,
revenue ≥ $1B (692 qualify). The pattern is a business-model taxonomy: marketplaces & OTAs, direct-to-consumer
health, mobile gaming, prestige beauty, for-profit education, sports betting. Financial-sector filers are
excluded here — their ASC-606 revenue tags (fee income only) make ratios artifacts, e.g. Capital One computes
to 73% — and non-calendar-year filers don't appear in SEC calendar frames. Full 692-company list, including
financials, in data/ad_intensity_screen.csv. ● = also in our top-15 advertiser panel.
Every advertiser, trended
Each panel is one advertiser's disclosed spend over time ($B); latest value and change
vs. 2019 up top, with the earnings-call quote where management addressed it. Click any card for the
full dossier — spend history to 1994, intensity, quarters, every quote, and 10-K language.
Part 2 · The pivot
The budgets grew — but platforms and adtech captured almost all of it
Aggregate disclosed ad spend of the biggest advertisers grew a certain amount since 2019
(the dashed line). Each sell-side segment's revenue growth over the same window is a bar — past the line
means the segment grew faster than the budgets themselves (gaining share); short of it means losing share.
Part 3 · The sell-side
Who gets paid — every company that banks a marketing budget
The revenue, margin and growth of the companies on the receiving end — grouped by segment.
Platforms with a disclosed ad segment (Alphabet, Meta, Amazon) are shown on their ad revenue, not total
company revenue. Growth is green if the company's annual pace beat the budgets' pace (+59% since 2019 ≈ 8%/yr);
amber if it lagged. Click any card for the full dossier —
revenue & margin history, quarterly momentum, disclosed ad-segment revenue (platforms), every earnings-call
quote, 10-K language, headcount and client-concentration disclosures.
Software vs. hours — revenue per employee
Each company's latest-fiscal-year revenue divided by the headcount disclosed in the same
10-K. This is the structural reason the cross looks the way it does: agencies sell people-hours, platforms
and adtech sell software. Amazon omitted (its 1.5M-person retail workforce makes the ratio meaningless);
Alphabet/Meta include non-ad staff, so their true ad-only figure is higher still.
Global agency holdcos — including the ones that don't file with the SEC
The foreign holdcos (Publicis, WPP, Dentsu, Havas, S4 Capital) report under IFRS with no
US-GAAP tags, so they're compared on the metric every agency discloses: organic net-revenue growth —
currency- and acquisition-neutral. Net revenue converted to USD for size only (documented FX).
Latest holdco pulse — trading and interim results are shown
in their own reported periods, then kept out of the full-year ranking below.
Organic growth year by year — the divergence is a trend, not a
snapshot. Every cell is from the holdco's own results release; blank = not verified from a primary source:
What each holdco's leadership told investors — verbatim from results releases and calls:
Show the full sell-side data table