About the Family Trees

This section includes Family Tree-style databases produced the Ad Age DataCenter.

Information in the Family Tree databases expands when users click the plus sign. In Agency Family Trees and some other databases, users can expand the datasets to even deeper levels. Beneath each agency holding company, data cards will expand at the agency network level; beneath agency networks, data will expand at the agency brand level.

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About Ad Age's advertising spending data

Leading National Advertisers
Advertising Age has ranked 100 Leading National Advertisers since 1956. Links above show rankings from 1997 to present.

Rankings are based on measured-media ad spending plus Ad Age DataCenter's estimate of unmeasured spending. Unmeasured spending represents the difference between media monitored by research companies and total U.S. advertising and promotional spending for the year.

For most years, the ranking is accompanied by profiles of the100 LNA. Profiles now can be found in Ad Age's interactive databases. Earlier reports were published in the print edition of Advertising Age and in PDF format.

WPP's Kantar Media and predecessor firms have been the primary source of measured media data for the 100 LNA.

Megabrands
In addition to the LNA ranking of companies, Ad Age ranks the most-advertised U.S. brands. For these megabrand rankings, Ad Age aggregates all measured spending for a given brand. Recent megabrand annual rankings are published within the 100 LNA reports. Earlier rankings ran quarterly, and later twice a year, in Ad Age beginning May 21, 1990. Data are measured media only, analyzed by Ad Age, using significant basic data from WPP’s Kantar Media.

Global Marketers
Ad Age published the first listing of the world's top 100 marketers, ranked by measured media, Dec. 14, 1987. In some years the ranking ran in Ad Age's then-sibling publications Advertising Age International and, later, Ad Age Global. Editions from 1998 to present are here. Data are compiled from local sources including WPP's Kantar Media, Nielsen, Ibope, PARC and others. The 10 largest advertisers by country also are ranked within the report.

Coen figures
Robert J. Coen, retired senior VP-director of forecasting at Interpublic Group of Cos, compiled advertising spending estimates by medium. Some of his historic data are shown here.

Advertising to Sales Ratios
Schonfeld & Associates supplied Ad Age with advertising-to-sales ratios by industry beginning Oct. 3, 1977. Similar data were run in Ad Age as far back as Dec. 29, 1969, from various sources.

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About Ad Age's agency data
The earliest Advertising Age data ranking agencies dates from 1943. Rankings initially appeared as the Agency Billings Report, then Agency Gross Income Rankings and most recently as the Agency Report.

Data on this site begin with the 1998 edition, which includes figures for 1996 and 1997.

Multi-tiered rankings
Agencies and agency companies are ranked on several levels.

Agency companies (sometimes holding companies) are the top level. This level may include independent agencies if they are of sufficient size.

Consolidated agency networks are the second level. These generally are branded, multinational networks, owning shops offering a variety of services.

The third level ranks agencies (or agency brands), often by discipline and without regard to the sibling shops in the same ranking.

A consolidated agency network may share the same name as an agency brand. But in the agency brand level, subsidiaries are stripped out of the network so that each each branded shop has an opportunity to be ranked. This offers a more granular level of analysis.

Rankings by discipline and the 75% rule
Rankings also include specialty disciplines, such as digital, search, direct, promotion, media, health care, African-American, Hispanic and Asian.

To keep rankings as equitable as possible, Ad Age uses the following rule: If an agency produces 75% or more of its revenue from a specific discipline, it will be shown ranked at 100% of its revenue in that specialty ranking. If revenue from the discipline is less than 75%, the agency will be ranked only by the percentage of its revenue produced by work in that specialty.

Overlap by discipline is allowed. For example, a 100% digital agency may have revenue from search representing only 25% of its total. The agency would be ranked among digital shops at 100% of its revenue. Among search-marketing agencies, the agency would only qualify to be ranked at 25% of its revenue.

Agency surveys
Rankings are based on Ad Age's widely distributed surveys of advertising agencies. Agencies are asked to provide Ad Age with revenue figures, employee data, specialties, clients lists and more.

From these surveys, agencies are ranked in many categories including multicultural, healthcare, and in some years, media billed.

However, in response to the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, many publicly traded agency companies declined to disclose financial information by agency beyond what they published in annual reports, the Form 10-K and other public documents and filings.

Beginning with the 2003 edition, Ad Age editors estimated the revenue figures by agency for these companies. In most cases, when agency estimates appear in rankings, the agency name is accompanied by an asterisk.

Here's the most recent Ad Age Agency Report Questionnaire.

Revenue (or gross income) versus billings
Early reports ranked agencies by capitalized billings, essentially the addition of three components: 1) costs for media space and time bought by the agency, 2) costs for materials and services charged to the client (including the markup) and 3) any flat fees charged by the agency, multiplied by 6.67 (the inverse of 15%, the assumed media commission paid to agencies at the time). This was sometimes known as volume, but most commonly know as just billings.

Subsequent studies began to include what were sometimes called non-traditional agencies--companies offering direct marketing, promotion and other services. Because the companies tended not to buy media, the idea of capitalized billings became unwieldy. (These agencies did business on a fee or revenue basis. The process of "grossing up" those fees, so they might be akin to media billings, made it difficult to produce accurate and equitable rankings.

Moreover, agencies either began to buy media for clients for a fee on a pass-through basis or, with the emergence of media specialist agencies, not buy or plan media at all.

Ad Age began ranking agencies by revenue (then called gross income) in 1972. The three components of revenue/gross income are 1) the commission on media, 2) the markup on materials and services and 3) flat fees charged to the client.

Media specialists
Media buying and planning duties migrated from ad agencies to media specialist agencies during the 1990s. The first ranking of media specialist agencies was published in Ad Age April 19, 1999, in that year's Agency Report.

Early media specialist rankings were by billings and after 2002 were based on data from RECMA, a Paris-based research company. Beginning with the 2008 edition of the Agency Report, these rankings are by revenue and based on Ad Age estimates or agency reporting.

Marketing-services agencies
Ad Age first ranked direct marketing agencies (at times referred to as direct response) March 26, 1987, in the Agency Report (however, Ad Age published rankings of direct shops as early as April 16, 1984, from the Direct Marketing Association); sales promotion agencies were first ranked April 4, 1988; digital agencies (initially called interactive agencies) July 26, 1999; and search agencies Nov. 6, 2006, in the Search Marketing Fact Pack.

These specialized agencies over the years began to merge, combine disciplines and offer other services such as event planning, customer relationship management and in-store marketing. Sometimes known as marketing services agencies, ranked agencies are now incorporated within Ad Age's annual Agency Reports.

Agencies outside the U.S.
Rankings of agencies outside the U.S began April 27, 1959, with 72 shops, all listed in a single table.

Later rankings showed agencies by country.

At their peak in 2002, these rankings included more than 1,500 agencies in 124 countries. By this point, at least one-third of agencies ranked in the international report were owned by or affiliated with large agency holding companies. In reponse to Sarbanes-Oxley, many public companies in recent years have declined to provide detailed financial data. Ad Age published the last of these reports in its print edition April 22, 2002.

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About digital

More information on the digital world also can be found in Ad Age's digital-themed editions.

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About jobs data

Ad Age DataCenter's monthly analysis of advertising and media employment based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Excel sheet shows monthly jobs data from 2000 to present.

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About Ad Age's media data

100 Leading Media Companies
Advertising Age produced the 100 Leading Media Companies ranking from 1981 through 2012. Links on AdAge.com show data from 1997 through 2012.

Ad Age ranked media companies by estimated annual net U.S. media revenue. Subrankings included largest companies by medium (TV, radio, cable, newspaper, magazine, etc.) and biggest properties by medium. Early editions of the 100 Leading Media Companies featured profiles of the companies and lists of all media properties.

Magazine 300
The Magazine 300 ranking first appeared in Ad Age in June 18, 1990, and ran through 2008. Data on this site go back to 1997.

The 300 largest U.S. magazines are ranked by estimated gross revenue, a figure that includes gross advertising revenue and gross circulation revenue. Subrankings often include breakouts of largest titles by sector (business, consumer, technology) and by ad revenue, ad revenue growth, ad pages and ad page growth.

For these reports, publishers were given data on which to comment and amend where appropriate. But primary sources (shown below) are generally used.

Circulation
Newspaper and magazine circulation rankings in Ad Age Datacenter are available from 1998 through 2013 for six-month periods. Earlier data ran in print editions of Ad Age.

Ad Linage and Publishers Information Bureau
This series of consumer magazine ad linage reports was first published in Ad Age in Jan. 21, 1946. Data on this site go back to 1996. Magazines were surveyed quarterly by Advertising Age until the third quarter of 2004. More recent linage data are available on this site from PIB through 2014. PIB data include ad dollar revenue estimates by publication.

Media Markets
A ranking of the ten largest media markets by media revenue per household was last printed in Ad Age in 2000.

Top 100 Markets
Rankings on the Top 100 overall markets by population began Dec. 15, 1975, and ran annually until Dec. 8, 1986, in the print edition. They include data on media, retail spending and disposable income.

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About the annuals and Fact Packs

Ad Age publishes annual guides to industry data, drawing on rankings and analysis by the Ad Age DataCenter. These print guides have appeared as both digest-sized Fact Packs and as data-focused issues of Ad Age. The 2014 guide was published as an Ad Age Fact Pack in December 2013. The first Ad Age Annual was published at the end of 2006 as a compilation of marketing, media and agency data. Indexes to the Annuals link to more comprehensive reports on each topic. Compilations of data for the four years prior were published as Fact Packs; these files are here in a downloadable PDF format.

Ad Age has published additional Fact Packs on such topics of interest as Hispanic Marketing and Media, Search Marketing and Digital/Interactive Marketing and Media.

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About the surveys

This section includes surveys produced by or commissioned by Ad Age.

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About the timelines

This section includes historic timelines produced by Ad Age.

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