Global media spend hit an estimated $401bn in 2022, a report from research group COMvergence shows.
Spend grew 6.4% year on year from $377bn in 2021, according to the 2022 Billings Rankings & Market Shares study. COMvergence’s analysis includes data from 46 countries that, combined, represents 96% of worldwide media spend.
Global media spend ($bn)
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.
Top global agencies by 2022 billings
In the UK, the order is slightly different and all three exhibited growth. The top media agency network in 2022 was MediaCom, with billings of $2.58bn – an increase of 3.7% year on year.
MediaCom was followed by Manning Gottlieb OMD, with billings rising 8.7% to $1.25bn. In third place was Essence, with billings of $1.04bn (up 3.5%).
North America was top region
Looking at the full 2022 spend of $401bn, North America accounted for 39% of spend. It was closely followed by Asia-Pacific at 34%, then EMEA at 25%. Latin America represented the remaining 2%.
Global media spend by regional share
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.
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