Advertising: famous wins, costly flops and who spends the most

The leaderboard: $232B from 211 companies

US accounting rules ask a company to disclose its advertising costs when they are material, and many put one line in the notes of their 10-K: “advertising costs were $X billion”. 211 of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 tag such a figure in their latest annual report. Each box below is one of them, its area its ad spend, grouped by sector; the color says how much of its revenue it was.

Amazon leads with $23.5B, ahead of Procter & Gamble ($10.2B) and Alphabet ($9.9B); the ten biggest spend 39% of the total. Some big names are missing because their filings no longer tag a figure: the last one from General Motors is $5.5B for fiscal 2013, from Apple $1.8B for fiscal 2015.

Per dollar of sales: from 0.6% to 5.2%

Big budgets come with big revenues, so the fairer measure is advertising as a share of sales. Half of the 211 companies spend less than 1.7%. Each dot below is one company, placed by that share (on a log scale: every step is ×10); the black tick is the sector's median.

Communication services lead with a median of 5.2%; Industrials are at the bottom with 0.6%. The highest share of all: Booking Holdings's marketing expenses came to 30.4% of its revenue. Materials, Utilities, Energy: one or two reporting companies each, in the table only.

Ad spend against revenue

The same companies on two log scales: revenue across, advertising up. The diagonals mark 0.1%, 1% and 10% of revenue, so a dot above a line spends more than that share. Pick a sector to light up its companies.

Over the years: advertising grew with sales

132 companies reported both advertising and revenue every fiscal year from 2009 to 2025. Together their ad spend grew ×2.22 and their revenue ×2.20. So advertising took about the same slice of sales throughout: 2.3% in 2009, 2.4% in 2025.

Company by company the story is less calm. The twelve biggest advertisers below, every year they reported: bars are dollars, the line under them the share of revenue.

Case files: wins and flops, in money

Famous campaigns are told and retold with round numbers nobody can trace. Here only figures from the companies' own filings or official statements made it in, each with the sentence it comes from and a link. Where a number could not be found in such a source, there is no number.

Companies almost never say that an ad caused a result, and we don't either: “after the campaign” means after, not because. Only two filings below draw the line themselves — Maytag about its free-flights promotion and Fox about the Super Bowl.

A century of famous campaigns

From soap to social media: the campaigns and media firsts that marketing textbooks keep coming back to. History only — figures appear only where a case file above has them from the company's own documents.