Earned & PaidWho grew faster than the budgets
Growth since 2019 for every part of the marketing economy we can measure. The dashed line is the advertisers' budgets (): a bar that reaches past it took a bigger share of the money. Each dot is a company inside the group. Tap a row to see who they are.
What they say about media
From the earnings calls we could get since 2019 (Motley Fool's transcripts; 2022–2025 are thinner), labeled by channel by our classifier: a label needs a sentence about the channel, and a company selling ads (Disney's upfronts, Amazon Ads) counts in the market view, not as its own marketing. Each cell is the share of that year's calls that mentioned the channel. Talk isn't spend: we count mentions, never how much anyone put into a channel.
The jobs
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics for advertising, PR and related services (NAICS 5418), yearly averages. Every US firm counts, holdco-owned or independent.
Who spends
How we measure
Marketing spend
The advertising or marketing expense line each company reports in its 10-K (SEC XBRL), one consistent line per company, nominal dollars, fiscal years. Where a company changed its disclosure the series starts where the consistent line starts. Share of revenue divides by revenue from the same filing. Financial firms' revenue tags can exclude interest income, so their ratios are shown only when meaningful. Leaning in = marketing is a bigger share of revenue than in 2019; riding growth = the business outgrew its marketing.
The growth chart
Each bar sums the same companies every year from fiscal 2019 to 2025 (a company counts only if it reports every year), so its length is the group's growth since 2019; each dot is one company's own growth. The budgets are the biggest advertisers that report every year since 2019 (tap the row to see which). Platform ad revenue is Alphabet's Google advertising, Meta's advertising and Amazon's advertising services, from each 10-K's revenue disaggregation. Adtech, martech, performance marketing and marketing services are the revenue of every public company in those groups that reports every year since 2019.
The agency holding companies report in euros, pounds and yen, and their reported revenue jumps with deals (Omnicom's purchase of IPG, the Havas spin-off, WPP's sale of Kantar), so their row uses the number they all report the same way: organic growth, which leaves out currency and acquisitions. Each company's yearly organic growth is compounded from 2019, and the row weights them by net revenue. Because it leaves out acquisitions it runs lower than reported revenue would.
Jobs and hourly pay are the Bureau of Labor Statistics' series for advertising, PR and related services (NAICS 5418), averaged per year; they're shown on their own because they count people, not dollars.
What's not here
No estimates of private spend, no share-of-search or ad-library proxies, no third-party spend models, and no flows we can't see: the chart compares growth, it doesn't claim whose budget paid whom. When a company doesn't disclose a number, that is the finding.
Also on Earned & Paid: every company's quotes, filings and news on its company page; agency holding companies' results and account moves on Industry; this week's filings on the front page.