Overview
Advertising agencies are experiencing a period of extraordinary transformation, caught between rising client expectations, mounting operational pressures, and revolutionary technological opportunities. To better understand the industry’s greatest obstacles and opportunities, Basis conducted a comprehensive survey of 100s of professionals at leading advertising agencies. The findings offer a window into the brewing challenges, strategic priorities, and future outlook shaping the agency landscape.
Our 2025 Advertising Agency Report explores those findings while providing agency leaders with actionable, data-driven insights to navigate this changing environment and position themselves for sustainable growth in the years ahead.
Here are some of the key findings from the report:
The State of Agency Work
- Increasing Difficulty: Agency professionals feel that their individual jobs—and digital advertising as a whole—have gotten harder over the past two years.
- Client Relationships Under Pressure: The increasing difficulty of agency work is putting a strain on critical partnerships, with more than half of all agencies saying their client relationships are more strained today than they were two years ago.
- Financial Health: Despite the challenges, just over half of agencies reported revenue growth in 2024. However, there are some signs of financial strain, with 40.9% of participants saying their agencies have conducted layoffs within in the past 12 months.
Critical Agency Challenges
- Operational Inefficiencies: The top four challenges identified by agency professionals are inefficient processes, rising costs, and shrinking profits, and siloed/disconnected systems.
- Tech Stack Complexity: More than half of agencies now manage eight or more tools in their tech stack, with 40% juggling 10+ tools.
- Brand Safety Concerns: External factors are compounding internal challenges, with brand safety rising to the surface as a particularly pressing concern that is only growing more demanding in the wake of recent content moderation decisions by Meta and X, among others.
Agency AI Adoption & Investment
- Widespread Implementation: Generative AI usage is now virtually universal, with 97.7% of agencies saying they leverage the technology regularly and over 90% using it at least once a week—both up significantly from previous years.
- Primary Use Cases: Today, agencies primarily use AI for ideation/brainstorming, research, and content creation. However, notably, fewer than half of agencies utilize it for solving their self-identified greatest challenges, such as streamlining processes.
- An Investment Priority: AI and automation rank at the top of agency leaders’ wish lists, with concrete plans to increase investment in the tech over the coming months.
Future Outlook
- Industry Confidence: Increased complexity, rising economic volatility, and broader industry uncertainty all appear to be weighing on agency work. And while agency professionals largely say they feel optimistic about the future of digital advertising (and of their own agencies), that optimism is noticeably more tempered than it was in 2024.
To get more insights into the state of advertising agencies, as well as an in-depth look at key takeaways and strategic opportunities based on the findings, download the full report today.
