Advertising Agencies

It’s been a rough year for advertisers, and 2021 will bring new challenges to a weary and quickly evolving industry. As advertisers attempt to reckon with the impending upheaval of data deprecation, they’ll be forced to divert attention toward more pressing — and distracting — issues that have emerged due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Forrester […]

The future of the “agency” is being shaped by technology. The belief that artificial intelligence and machines will displace human labor is pervasive across many industries. For agencies, embracing artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation (IA) comes with trepidation that the human side of creativity will be forever lost. Even though AI tantalizes marketers with […]

Ever since the release of the Association of National Advertisers’ K2 Report on media transparency, marketers and firms have looked for better mechanisms to control their media. For ambitious companies, the desire for more impact has led some to in-house media. The prospect of an in-house team of media-savvy professionals maximizing the firm’s buying power […]

The coronavirus pandemic has forced many firms to drastically cut marketing spending and reevaluate their agency relationships. In this episode of What It Means, Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall reviews the latest changes and what options CMOs have going forward.

The Wild West days of digital advertising are over. The next phase of advertising will focus on the customer experience. In this episode of What It Means, we feature VP and Principal Analyst Joanna O’Connell’s recent CX North America keynote discussing the future of advertising.

Publicis Groupe announced today the creation of “The Pact, Powered by Epsilon,” a new digital media planning and buying service that offers money-back performance commitments that guarantee the business outcomes from digital marketing campaigns. The introduction of The Pact is a timely move to give brands a mechanism to manage the risk of marketing during […]

Agencies’ pivotal role in the services marketplace means they too will feel the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Combined with deferred travel and an increase in online meetings among agency staff and marketing clients, the coronavirus has effectively (if only temporarily) changed the way agencies work.

Publishers are placing their bets on consumers, investing in quality content and better subscriber experiences. Yet they know they still need ad dollars to thrive.

If you missed my take on how Super Bowl LIV highlights the new normal that agencies and advertisers face, you can read it here. There’s no shortage of media outlets previewing and prereleasing Super Bowl commercials. You can see the brands running ads during Super Bowl LIV at USA Today’s Ad Meter, Ad Age, Adweek, […]

Advertising's premier event showcased the trends and obstacles that advertisers and agencies face.

Mounting pressures on marketing leaders to deliver better brand experiences are forcing agencies to evolve. On this week’s What It Means, Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall discusses the changes ahead for agencies in 2020 and beyond. 

Activating The Holding Company The Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG) announced the creation of Kinesso, a martech company that will build products and software solutions to scale precision marketing. This move gives IPG the opportunity to power both media and creative with technology and data-driven solutions that use Acxiom as the data management layer and […]

Agency data and technology capabilities are taking center stage as every CMO feels the mounting pressure for more performance from their marketing and media investments. Agencies are betting heavily on data and building audience activation platforms to deliver growth, efficiency, and scale. These moves are paying off in media. However, the promise of data-driven creative […]

When brand creativity is separated from digital execution, the work can’t work together. The absence of creativity has led to digital sameness and stagnant customer experience. Learn more.

I’m excited to share that “The Forrester Wave™: Performance Marketing Agencies, Q3 2019” is live. This is the newest iteration of one of Forrester’s longest-running Wave evaluations: search marketing agencies. We first evaluated search marketing agencies in 2006, led by my colleague Shar VanBoskirk. Since then, we’ve done six Waves from 2006 to 2017. In […]

It’s become de rigueur for digital types to claim that traditional TV advertising is fast becoming obsolete. And they’re not entirely wrong. But they’re also not entirely right. Long and short, it’s complicated. Doubtless, the industry — among them media companies, brands that’ve long counted on TV for needed reach and frequency, and big media […]

CMO-CIO collaboration is critical to delivering the rich digital experiences that customers have come to expect. Forrester VP and Research Director Keith Johnston explains why good CMO-CIO partnerships are still rare and what it will take to change that.

Is your CMO considering shifting investments in marketing technology toward the services of creative agencies, as Forrester recommends? You should find out — because one of two possible scenarios will play out. The winning scenario: If you 1) boost your internal design team and better integrate brand; 2) contract with firms that apply human-centric design; and […]

  Agencies’ creative perspective, the very currency of the business, is at risk and can only be realized by shifting billions from tech to fund creative differentiation. “The value of agency creativity is at risk of disappearing.” The marketing industry is woefully out of balance, from agency/client relationships to new business requirements and compensation. The […]