• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 15, 2023

Editor's Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version reporting that Apple would likely rank in the top 10, not 25 biggest ad sellers of 2022. Both ranks were referenced verbatim in the podcast it was based on, but the top 25 ranking is the correct one, according to GroupM.

With expected ad sales of somewhere between $1 billion and $20 billion, Apple -- a company better known for buying ads than selling them -- is about to rank among the top 25 media sales organizations, according to the business intelligence team at GroupM.

Why the range, because Apple doesn’t break out its advertising sales the way traditional media sales organization do, and the GroupM team is still trying to tease it out.

“We’re finalizing that over the next week or so,” GroupM Global Director of Business Intelligence Kate Scott-Dawkins said during the weekly “This Week, Next Week” podcast she co-hosts with Global President of Business Intelligence Brian Wieser.

“I think they’ll make the top 10,” she assured, adding: “We might see some [other media ad sales organizations] that lose a few ranking positions.”

During the podcast, which focused mainly on a high-level discussion about the prospects for a JIC – or a joint industry committee -- setting new audience-measurement standards for the U.S. ad industry, as well as how they operate around the world (see related story), Scott-Dawkins and Wieser also speculated that the big ad industry news this week would be Netflix’s earnings release on Thursday, and how much detail it will disclose on the ad revenue it has been generating from its new hybrid subscription plans.

“Will they report actual ad revenue,” Wieser questioned.

“We’ll understand how positive they are about it whether they give us actual numbers or they give us directionally strong, ‘better than expected,” she responded, adding, “We’ll take a read from that.”