WPP
Speaking on the company's fourth quarter earnings call, WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell gave some interesting nuggets about the company's media outlay last year.
"Google has become our biggest media partner," he said. Last year WPP invested $2.9 billion of its $75 billion media bookings into Google ads.
That's massive. Put that another way, nearly 5% of the (as-yet unaudited, and not a direct apples-to-apples comparison as the two companies have different reporting periods) $59 billion in advertising revenue Google reported last year came from WPP.
As one mobile executive summarized to Business Insider on Twitter:
So @larakiara that's 3.9% of WPP's total (offline and online) media spend with just one company. Not insignificant.
- Steve Ricketts (@stevejricketts) March 9, 2015
- Facebook: $640 million
- Yahoo: $400 million
- Twitter: $150 million
- AOL: $100 million
Later on in the call, Sorrell spoke about the kind of things that keep him up at night in terms of their impact to WPP's business.
"The G-word has not receded, I still worry about disintermediation," he said. By "G-word," he means Google.