Top advertisers: July 2023

Key takeaways:

• Amazon Prime Day in July has made Amazon king of the hill for the top advertising spenders list.

• Walmart strategically boosted ad spending on YouTube for its Walmart+ membership and Walmart Week, challenging Amazon's Prime Day.

• Shein and Temu adopted post-event ad spending surges, leveraging platforms like Facebook to mirror the success of Amazon Prime Day.

The influence of Amazon Prime Day in July transforms the advertising landscape, rewarding companies that can allocate ad spend effectively. In July, Amazon supplanted Procter and Gamble as the top advertiser by ad spend, ending the former company’s streak after they had held the position from April through June.

Amazon dramatically increased their spending on ads promoting Amazon Prime membership, seeing a rise from $6.7M in June to a whopping $16.6M in July. The company took a diversified approach to this allocation, placing the highest share that promoted Amazon Prime membership to OTT, with 32% going to the channel in the month of July. However, looking closer, we see that from July 1 to July 12 ( in the run up to and through Prime Day), Amazon spent the most on Instagram, allocating 22% of its spending promoting its membership on the channel.  

Walmart jumped from 9th to 6th place in July as it ramped up promotions of its own membership program, Walmart+ and promoted Walmart Week, a Sales event competing with Amazon’s Prime Day. This year, Walmart went all in on Youtube, with 67% of it’s ad spend for Walmart+ going to the channel. The company took a more strategic approach this time around, eschewing last year’s allocation of 44% to Facebook, and instead spending most heavily in the period leading up to and through Walmart+ Week, with Youtube ad spend peaking at nearly $1.4M on July 6.

The discount retailers Shein and Temu made it into the top ten in July, with Shein entering the top ten for the first time at number 7, and Temu jumping to 3rd place. Both advertisers took a similar approach to distributing ad spend. Temu ad spend peaked on July 15, soon after Prime Day and Walmart Week ended, while Shein ramped up, with an emphasis on Facebook, beginning July 13th, and peaking on the 23rd. This strategy of increased ad spend in the days following the retail giants is one to keep an eye on in case others begin to follow and it gains momentum as Amazon Prime Day has over the last 8 years. 

The last noteworthy development was Mihoyo, publisher of the hit games Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail entering the top ten at 9th place. The mobile game publisher has aimed high from the very beginning, with their release of Genshin Impact, and has been intent on making a splash with Honkai: Star Rail, heavily promoting their new game with an ad spend strategy highly focused on Youtube. 90% of all Mihoyo spend was allocated to this channel, and 92% of all ad spend across channels was in service of promoting their new game. 

Market and comparative intelligence like this starts here…Sensor Tower.