Global media spend surpassed $400bn in 2022

The “big six” advertising holding groups accounted for $213bn of spend in 2022 – up 6% from $201bn in 2021. When including billings handled by major independent agencies, spend reached $253bn – or 60% of the global total.

The remaining 40% was handled by smaller independent shops, Chinese, Japanese and South Korean creative agencies, as well as advertisers’ in-house departments, COMvergence said.

In the UK, the 2022 market was estimated at $19bn – up 6.9% from 2021. Of this figure, the big six plus major independents represented $16bn.

Digital gains

The use of digital continues to increase. COMvergence estimates that digital had a 48% share of global spend (when looking at billings handled by the big six and major independents) in 2022 at $121bn – up from 43% in 2021 and 39% in 2020.

Among the big six, digital spend grew 16% year on year to reach $102.3bn. Meanwhile, offline spend fell 1% to $110.9bn.

In the UK, digital’s share lagged slightly behind the global market as a whole at 44%, up from 41% in 2021.

OMD led agencies

Globally, Omnicom’s OMD was the top agency network in 2022, handling $22.5bn in billings.

The biggest win by OMD in 2022 was the L’Oréal US business, while it also picked up others including Virgin Media O2 in the UK and Suncorp in Australia.

OMD is followed by two WPP networks: Mindshare and MediaCom, which accounted for $22bn and $20bn respectively.

Of the top three, MediaCom was the only one to have increased its billings. MediaCom and Essence officially merged at the start of 2023.

However, it should be noted that the big six withdrew from Russia in March 2022, therefore 2022 figures quoted did not include that country. The impact was particularly clear for OMD, whose 2021 billings in Russia amounted to $1.3bn, according to COMvergence.

The UK on its own accounted for 5% of global spend in 2022, a similar share to the previous year.

COMvergence is Campaign’s new data partner on media activity on Advertising Intelligence, which tracks new business on a global basis.