by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, May 26, 2016
Pure-play digital media companies ranked among the top 30 largest media suppliers in the world, but the list continues to be dominated by media companies that were founded on the basis of non-digital media. That’s the finding of an analysis released this morning by Publicis’ Zenith unit, ranking the volume of Madison Avenue’s biggest supply-chain players.
Google parent Alphabet continues to dominate the list at No. 1, but other than Facebook (No. 5) and China’s Baidu (No. 9) “traditional” media suppliers represent the rest of the top 10. The other pure-play digital suppliers — Yahoo (No. 15) and Microsoft (No. 17) — have not exactly been ascendant in recent years, although Google’s, Facebook’s and Baidu’s market power have been growing significantly as Madison Avenue reorganizes itself around the biggest-scale suppliers of digital media inventory.
To illustrate how much the media supply chain is becoming stratified — and stratified among digital’s Big 5 — consider that the five pure-plays now represent about 19% of all global ad spending, but Google alone represents 12%, according to Zenith.
The categorization of digital vs. non-digital may be an anachronism itself, as all of the companies on the list are now significant suppliers of digital media inventory too.
“The traditional media owners in our top 30 ranking have been scrambling to scale up their own digital businesses, to various degrees of success,” Jonathan Barnard, Zenith’s head of forecasting, said in a statement released with the report. “As digital ad technology — such as programmatic buying — spreads to traditional media, it will further shake up the businesses of traditional media owners, but also provide them with new opportunities for growth.”
Source: Zenith Top Thirty Global Media Companies Report
MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily
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