Biggest Advertisers Are Sending Their Dollars to Digital

The country’s largest marketers are slashing their advertising budgets as they shift a larger portion of their spending to digital.

The 10 biggest advertisers cut spending by 4.2 percent in 2014, to $15.3 billion from $16 billion a year earlier, according to the latest report from Kantar Media, a research firm owned by the advertising conglomerate WPP. Procter & Gamble, the top advertiser, lowered its ad spending in 2014 by 14.4 percent, bringing its expenditures to $2.6 billion, the report showed. “Large advertisers in particular are the ones that are most aggressively moving budgets into digital, and the cost efficiencies of digital advertising enable many marketers to buy more for less,” said Jon Swallen, the chief research officer at Kantar Media North America. A good portion of those dollars are going into fast-growing digital segments like video and mobile, which Kantar does not track.