Procter & Gamble, General Motors and Time Warner retained their respective first, second and third place rankings among America's top advertisers in 2005.
So reports US adbiz bible Advertising Age in its annual Leading National Advertiser Report, published Monday. This shows P&G and GM both leaping the $4 billion (€3.19bn; £2.2bn) hurdle for the first time in advertising history, between them accounting for nearly 9% of total expenditure ($101.31bn) among the top 100 national advertisers
Astronomic though these numbers may be, they represent a meager increase of just 1.3% on 2004 - a factor ascribed by AdAge to the absence of any major event such as a presidential election or the Olympics.
There is little change among the giants inhabiting the Top Twenty slot, only Unilever and Altria re-joining the exclusive club, respectively from their 2004 rankings of 25 and 21.
The latest Top twenty rundown is as follows . . .
| Rank | ||||
| 2005 | 2004 | Advertiser | 2005 $ (millions) | % change on 2004 |
| 1 | 1 | Procter & Gamble | 4,608.8 | -3.5 |
| 2 | 2 | General Motors | 4,353.2 | +7.1 |
| 3 | 3 | Time Warner | 3,493.7 | +2.7 |
| 4 | 8 | Verizon | 2,483.7 | +4.9 |
| 5 | 4 | AT&T | 2,470.8 | -26.0 |
| 6 | 7 | Ford Motor | 2,398.4 | +0.6 |
| 7 | 6 | Walt Disney | 2,278.8 | -5.4 |
| 8 | 9 | Johnson & Johnson | 2,209.3 | +3.6 |
| 9 | 13 | GlaxoSmithKline | 2,194.2 | +18.1 |
| 10 | 5 | DaimlerChrysler | 2,178.6 | -12.9 |
| 11 | 10 | Pfizer | 2,152.5 | +1.9 |
| 12 | 11 | General Electric | 1,916.8 | -1.9 |
| 13 | 14 | Toyota Motor | 1,784.5 | -2.8 |
| 14 | 15 | Sony | 1,777.9 | +6.4 |
| 15 | 12 | Sears Holdings | 1,712.9 | -8.7 |
| 16 | 16 | Sprint Nextel | 1,662.8 | +1.2 |
| 17 | 20 | McDonald's | 1,662.1 | +8.5 |
| 18 | 25 | Unilever | 1,552.3 | +14.0 |
| 19 | 17 | Viacom | 1,496.7 | -5.4 |
| 20 | 21 | Altria Group | 1,485.7 | +4.5 |
Media trends are also reflected in the report. The use of spot TV among all advertisers fell 8.9% to $17.12bn, due mainly to the absence of the biennial wave of political advertising. Yet the spend trend by the top 100 advertisers saw spot TV plunge 17.1% to $5.34 billion, while within the auto category the dive was slightly deeper - down 17.7%.
Among the Top 100 overall, newspaper advertising grew only 1.5% to $25.54bn. Inevitably, some monies from traditional media were diverted into other hotter media such as cable TV networks, up 14.9% (from the auto category) and 11% from all advertisers; while the internet registered a 21.3% increase from auto advertisers versus 13.3% from all advertisers.
Data sourced from AdAge (USA); additional content by WARC staff
