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I was just reading the latest issue of OMMA Magazine and they have a list of the top 50 spending advertisers from 2006, there is nothing new here because ClickZ tends to publish this data every month.  Here is the March 2007 Report for example.  What I found interesting is that they broke out the top ten and showed what they spend in off line advertising.  

Now OMMA did not break it down as to what precentage of spend these advertisers spent online vs off line nor did they even directly compare the two pieces of data.  I have always wanted to really look at this aspect of budget from the largest spenders but never took the time to gather all the data.  Well with it all right there I decided to create a simple table to look at this, below are the results which may raise an eyebrow or two. 

As you can see there is one big thing that stands out!  The precentage of total spend made up by online advertising has a huge variance in it.  However this is due to the total spend, not the total online spend.  Some players like AT&T spend enough to be #2 online over all but that only makes up about 7.5% of their total ad spend per year. 

Now look at Dell, their online spend is about 30 million dollars less then AT&T yet it makes up a healthy 18.8% of their total spend.  

As you move down from Dell realize that less then 20 million dollars seperate the #3 from the #10 position with many spots only differing by a few hundred thousand dollars while the off line spend bounces like mid east oil chart.

Finally note that the lowest percentage of online spending is by General Motors (5.63%) while the highest spend if from Apollo Group (98.4%).

Now the reality is a lot could be read into these numbers and doing so would be a mistake.  Of course the online spend is close company to company because that is how they were ranked yet taking a look at how the biggest players are spending their total ad budgets is interesting and enlightening. 

So let's take a look just for fun at the top ten online advertisers in total spending ranked by percentage of total spend…

1. Apollo Group
2. Experian
3. TD Ameritrade
4. IAC/Interactive Corp
5. Vonage
6. Dell
7. Walt Disney
8. AT&T
9. Verizon
10. General Motors

 So what do these numbers mean to you?  What precentage of spend do your company or typical client allocated to online vs. off line sales?  More interesting, find the company with the closest percentage to your own and compare their business model, target demographic and niche to yours.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: Vonage, AT&T, Dell, Walt Disney, General Motors, Experian Group, Verizon, Apollo Group, IAC/Interactive Corp, Ameritrade, APOL, VG, ATT, DIS, GM, EXPN, VZ, IACI, AMTD

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