Abstract: I will describe Wilson loops in N=4 super Yang-Mills, for external particles in k-rank totally symmetric representations. I will argue that for large k the perturbative resummation of diagrams is dominated by ladder diagrams and simply given by the exponential of the 1-loop result. This will be verified -for a generic family of Wilson loops- in the strong coupling limit performing a classical D-brane computation and using the AdS/CFT correspondence. I will also comment on the extension of this 1-loop exponentiation to other gauge theories.