Agency leaders who feel confident in their client relationships face an uncomfortable reality: There's a good chance their clients feel differently. While 40% of agencies rate their brand partnerships as excellent, only 13% of brands feel the same.
As brand-agency relationships evolve alongside rapid technological innovation and an increasingly complex media environment, it’s critical for agency leaders to understand the reasons for this gap—and the pressures shaping their clients’ expectations. Recent waves of holding company consolidations have only amplified this uncertainty, prompting brands to question how these structural shifts will impact their partnerships and service delivery. This is especially true amidst economic uncertainty, with most CMOs struggling to balance stagnant marketing budgets with intense pressure to drive measurable business impact.
To succeed in this environment, agency leaders must first develop a deep understanding of where their clients are pushing them to evolve and then differentiate their businesses in those areas. At the same time, they must maintain focus on two fundamentals: driving effectiveness and telling compelling, transparent stories about how that effectiveness is achieved.
Among the factors reshaping brand-agency relationships, three demand particular focus:
Each of these forces is changing what brands expect from their agency partners and how agencies must operate to meet those expectations. AI is changing the economics of agency work and prompting conversations around pricing and value. Media fragmentation is redefining agencies' role, increasingly shifting them from comprehensive partners to specialized experts. And rising client expectations are raising the stakes for agencies across the board. Understanding how each force is driving change—and how to respond—is essential for agencies looking to adapt and thrive.
Tech innovations, especially AI, are empowering brands and agencies with substantial efficiencies. The opportunity is particularly impactful for agencies, as they can apply efficiency gains across multiple clients (likely one reason why agencies have adopted AI more extensively than brands).
As AI and other technologies change how agency marketers work, brands are pushing agencies to evolve their pricing models. “Brands understand that the output of adopting these new technologies is efficiency at scale,” says Dan Wilson, Group VP of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis. “They want to know how agencies plan to share those efficiency gains with them.”
At the same time, Wilson notes that most brands and agencies haven’t reached the point where AI investments have met expectations. Barriers to adoption are also a problem, with 70% of both agencies and brands yet to fully scale the technology across media planning, activation, and analysis due to adoption challenges. This puts agencies in the difficult position of needing to evolve their pricing models to reflect AI efficiency gains that aren’t yet fully realized.
Media complexity is a major challenge for agencies and brands, and most feel their organizations’ solutions to fragmentation are only moderately effective.
This complexity and fragmentation make it difficult for agencies to provide holistic, data-driven insights around campaign performance and strategy. These problems hinder transparency, which in turn often erodes client relationships—a trend reflected in data showing over half of agency marketers report their client relationships are more strained now than they were two years ago.
Additionally, media complexity is driving brands to split their work across multiple specialized agencies. “As the industry has grown more complex, brands are understanding that, while the single, streamlined agency relationship sounds nice, it often doesn’t result in the effectiveness they’re after,” says Wilson.
This has redefined the role of the modern agency. Success now depends less on being the comprehensive partner who does everything and more on delivering specialized expertise and nimble execution in targeted areas of the marketing mix.
As tech evolutions and media fragmentation push the industry to evolve, brand expectations are growing more sophisticated in kind.
“Brands are just harder graders these days,” says Wilson. “They know what to expect, and when they’re not getting it, they’re quick to make that known and potentially make changes.” Data reflects this impatience, with one 2024 survey finding that 40% of brand respondents reported plans to switch from their primary agency within six months.
These rising expectations signal a shift in what brands want from their agencies. Where agencies once focused primarily on execution, brands now expect them to serve as trusted advisors—providing strategic guidance, offering informed perspectives on emerging technologies and tactics, and helping brands navigate marketing complexity.
With so many forces changing brand-agency relationships, agency leaders need clear priorities to inform the evolution of their businesses. Two fundamentals should guide strategic decision making:
Effectiveness will always be brands' primary concern, but delivering results is only half the battle. Agencies must also articulate how and why their strategies work.
“Storytelling will always be at the crux of what makes a good agency partnership,” says Lisa Olszewski, VP of Brand Development at Basis. “An agency’s ability to communicate how a brand’s investment is moving the needle for their business is fundamental to success.”
These priorities—driving effectiveness and demonstrating it through storytelling—matter across all three forces reshaping partnerships that this article has explored thus far. Agencies that consistently drive effectiveness and demonstrate it through compelling storytelling across these areas will be best positioned to strengthen client relationships and thrive amid industry change.
As the industry races to adopt AI, agencies who approach the technology strategically can make significant efficiency gains for both their clients and their own businesses.
Strategic integration is the foundation of successful tech adoption. Rather than accumulating a variety of disparate point solutions, agencies must prioritize interoperability with their existing tech stacks. This ensures new tools truly enhance team workflows rather than inadvertently complicating them.
Data readiness represents one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption at scale. Because AI effectiveness depends on data quality, agencies that invest in data infrastructure will significantly outperform competitors who don't. Without clean, well-organized data, even the most sophisticated AI tools will underdeliver.
Leaders should also consider rethinking their pricing models to meet client expectations for cost structures that reflect how AI is changing agency work. “A lot of agencies are exploring hybrid pricing models that mix a percent of media with incentive tiers based on innovation or performance,” says Olszewski. “We’re still in the early days of figuring it out, but it’s clear there’s an appetite in the industry for new approaches to pricing.”
Transparency should be another key consideration for agency leaders evaluating their tech stacks. As lack of transparency marks a major frustration for many brands, agencies who can offer it will set their businesses apart. “Brands want to know exactly where their media is running and what's driving results,” says Olszewski. Agencies that leverage transparency-forward solutions—for example, dashboards that offer holistic views of campaign performance across platforms—can deliver on a critical client expectation and build stronger relationships as a result.
As they work to optimize their investments, agencies must also craft compelling narratives about how their tech stack delivers superior results and drives measurable business impact. This means moving beyond general claims of increased efficiency to share concrete proof points—for example, demonstrating how AI-based optimization delivers higher ROAS than manual budget adjustments, or quantifying the hours per week that workflow automation technology saves agency teams.
In today's fragmented media environment, brands need agencies that can move with speed and clarity, quickly pivoting strategies based on performance data and adjusting campaigns in real-time. Yet rising media complexity makes this agility increasingly difficult to achieve, as agency teams navigate disconnected platforms, channels, and tools throughout their daily work.
The need for agility extends beyond campaign execution to the partnership itself. “Brands need agency partners who can think on their feet and adjust the relationship as the brand or the market changes,” says Olszewski.
Technology can play a critical role here. By adopting tools that unify disparate platforms and automate manual processes throughout the campaign life cycle, agency leaders can deliver the agility clients are looking for.
To gain the fullest value from these investments, agencies must consistently weave them into their client storytelling, demonstrating how their tech stack delivers the agility and insight that sets them apart in an increasingly fragmented landscape. In a multi-agency environment where brands constantly compare partners, clear communication about operational advantages can be the difference between deepening relationships and losing them.
Finally, agencies should drive effectiveness by deepening their role as trusted advisors. Marketing and media complexity has increased to the point where it has created significant opportunities for agencies that can guide clients through constant change.
“Brands want a partner who’s evaluating things with them, not just for them, whether that’s analytics, automation tools, creative strategy, or something else.” notes Olszewski. Clients need their agencies to weigh in on critical questions: Which platforms deserve investment? How should we approach AI adoption? What does an effective data strategy look like?
"One of the things brands have relied on their agency partners for is to help them stay informed," says Wilson. "That's a massive value proposition of working with an agency. They educate the brand, and the brand grows more and more educated over the years as a result."
Crafting compelling stories around strategies and impact is a critical piece of this advisory role, helping brands understand not just what agencies do, but why it matters. This might mean walking a client through the rationale behind a channel mix shift based on emerging consumer behavior, or recommending budget adjustments based on competitive intel. Agencies that excel at this consultative storytelling build client confidence and deepen trust by clarifying the 'why' behind every recommendation.
While each agency's path forward will depend on its unique strengths and client base, successful leaders will anchor their strategies around two constants: driving measurable effectiveness and telling compelling stories about how that effectiveness is achieved. By strategically investing in technology that enhances both capabilities and transparency, prioritizing nimbleness in an increasingly fragmented landscape, and deepening their role as trusted advisors, agencies can strengthen client relationships and differentiate themselves in a competitive market. Those who embrace these shifts will be well-positioned to close the perception gap with brands, retain valuable clients, and thrive amid ongoing industry transformation.
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Looking for more in-depth insights around how brand-agency relationships are evolving? Our research study with AdExchanger, Broken Trust, Blurred Lines: Who Owns the Future of Advertising? reveals insights from brand and agency leaders around the major obstacles facing the industry, areas of conflict and potential growth, and the forces driving digital advertising's evolution.
Most trends reports are nothing more than wishlists and buzzwords, filled with the latest overhyped products and aspirational technologies while self-servingly touting the publisher’s own capabilities as The Next Big Thing That You So Desperately Need™.
And sure, admittedly, those can be kind of fun to read! After all, it’s cool to think about how a new innovation or a secret insight or tactic that was closely held until just this very moment (and that has only now been shared exclusively with you) will unlock unparalleled fortune and success in the year ahead. But in reality, you end up with a lot of empty promises, money pits, and hot takes that fade into foggy memories right around the time the New Year rolls around. For every innovation that claims to be the “next smartphone!” there are dozens of NFTs, metaverses, and blockchains left scattered in the wake, and marketers are stuck holding on for dear life as the industry confronts unprecedented fragmentation, complexity, and C-suite expectations.
Lucky for you, this is a very different kinds of trends report.
Inside, you will find real perspective on four key topics that are poised to shape the year ahead. Each highlights an area where actual innovation is well positioned to address and overcome long-standing challenges and help marketers see meaningful, measurable growth in 2026. No gimmickry. No secret (or not-so-secret) salesmanship. Just real insights.
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The Quality Quandary: Ignorance may seem like bliss, but it comes with a heavy price. In 2026, transparency and accountability will be the true currency of performance.
Streaming TV's Inequity: Premium platforms don’t guarantee premium placements. It’s time for advertisers’ approach to CTV to evolve.
Agents of Chaos: By late 2026, agentic AI will move from pilot projects to production infrastructure. As agentic AI evolves from hype to infrastructure, brands must learn to communicate with both humans and machines.
Brand Immunity: In an age of cultural volatility, social fragmentation, and algorithmic authority, brand loyalty must be earned—and never assumed.
Uncover the trends and opportunities that will shape advertising in the year ahead: Download Rewinding to Fast Forward: The 2026 Digital Advertising Trends Report today!
Patchwork privacy fixes and workarounds are failing brands and advertisers. Liz Emery, co-founder of Vyvr, is tackling the adtech industry’s battle with signal loss and compliance challenges.
She joins host Noor Naseer to share critical lessons from the privacy trenches, practical advice for avoiding legal risks, and her vision for building data infrastructure that’s ready for whatever comes next—from AI to new privacy laws and beyond.
Marketing teams face significant pressure to prove the ROI for every dollar spent, particularly amidst today’s economic volatility. Performance tactics often drive immediate results, but brand recall is what makes those tactics more efficient over time, and memory is what builds that recall.
Every ad impression either strengthens existing connections or disappears among competing messages. Brands that stay present in consumers’ minds are able to account for memory much more easily by aligning creative, media, and measurement around a common goal: helping audiences remember them when it’s time to buy.
That alignment turns campaigns from short-lived bursts of visibility into systems that build familiarity and trust over time. Each creative cue, channel, and pacing decision enforces (or reinforces) what audiences know, and these consistent exposures create lasting awareness and growing preference. Memory, more than momentary visibility, is what ultimately drives long-term brand impact.
Today, that long-term focus is especially critical. Economic uncertainty—along with other factors including last-click attribution and enhanced optimization—has led many teams to overinvest in short-term performance tactics. Yet research shows that taking a balanced approach to short- and long-term marketing can lift overall revenue returns by a median of 90%. Long-term brand activity builds memory, which sustains performance even when short-term demand fluctuates.
Building brand memory is an intentional process. It requires long-term coordination across creative, media, and measurement so every campaign contributes to familiarity and trust that ultimately strengthens what consumers remember.
That process starts with how people form memories in the first place. Audiences notice something, pay attention to it, hold it briefly in their short-term memory and—if they determine it’s meaningful or easy to process—remember it long-term. Four factors shape whether a brand makes it through these stages: attention, attraction, emotion, and cognitive load. When these elements work together, the message becomes easier to retrieve later.
At its core, memory building happens through consistency. Once brands capture audience attention, they then help people recognize, rehearse, and remember the brand across time and context. Yet many teams invest heavily in breakthrough moments without simultaneously planning for how to capitalize on that initial awareness. Consumers who notice a brand may not be ready to purchase immediately, and without building upon that initial awareness, memory fades before purchase intent emerges—and the investment fails to deliver its full value.
Of course, memory doesn’t develop through frequency alone. Running the same creative over and over can lead to fatigue rather than recall. To become a part of long-term memory (and consumers’ consideration sets) brands must craft experiences that are coherent, structured sequences where each touchpoint reinforces what audiences already know through varied formats that connect back to the original message. Encoding, a critical component of memory building, relies on pattern recognition. Distinctive assets, such as visuals, sounds, language, and tone, can act as anchors, allowing each exposure to connect to the last.
When teams plan creative and media together, that exposure becomes cumulative rather than fragmented. This turns brand building from a series of distinct campaigns into a continuous, compounding process that strengthens recognition over time. And the results are measurable: Over a five-year period, advertising from the most consistent brands is projected to grow market share more than twice as effectively as the least consistent brands, even when media investment is the same. Without this foundation, even high-performing campaigns require constant spending to maintain results.
A strong media strategy ensures creative ideas translate into lasting brand presence. This begins with understanding a brand’s creative brief, target audiences, and sales cycle. Timing matters, too: Brands need to trigger attention before it’s too late, ensuring memory is established well ahead of peak purchase windows.
Each channel contributes to that goal in a distinct way:
The effectiveness of a media strategy depends on how these channels work together over time. Strong memory is built through sequencing, or planning for how one exposure carries forward to the next. A brand might start with a large-scale YouTube awareness push designed to introduce a story and distinctive visual cues, then follow with lighter programmatic and audio placements that echo the same message. Each layer builds on the last, keeping the brand familiar without inducing fatigue. This type of consistency pushes towards advertising that is always present but never overwhelming—the type that builds long-term memory.
This balance between reach and restraint requires deliberate pacing. Oversaturation can lead to cognitive overload, but inconsistency weakens memory. The most effective campaigns sustain attention through a steady cadence of touchpoints that collectively build recognition and trust.
For instance, a campaign designed to drive awareness ahead of a key retail period might lead with engaging video and display formats, then pivot to conversion-driven placements closer to the point of sale. Proactive planning ensures every impression across every channel reinforces a single, coherent message that compounds over time.
Measurement ties such a strategy together. Brand lift studies and brand health tracking make it possible to show how such efforts contribute to both recall and sales outcomes, and metrics like brand awareness, advertising awareness, and favorability reveal whether campaigns are strengthening memory or simply generating impressions. Such metrics not only validate the impact of memory-building activity but also guide optimization, showing where attention translates most effectively into action.
Ultimately, the brands that balance these elements—consistency, emotional resonance, and strategic pacing—are the ones that stay with consumers long after exposure. Brands that prioritize memory transform consistent storytelling into lasting competitive strength.
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Part of building memory is capturing audience attention. But today, that attention is at a premium. Explore Winning the Battle for Audience Attention for insights into how advertisers can earn and sustain focus in an increasingly saturated digital environment.
Welcome to our new series, “The Breakdown.” Each post breaks down a complex marketing concept and explores its applications—helping you make smarter decisions that drive meaningful results.
How often do you say “grab a Kleenex” instead of “grab a tissue?” Or ask, “Do you have a Band-Aid?” rather than say “I need an adhesive bandage?” What about, “Where’s the Tupperware?” versus “Where are your plastic food containers?”
These are all examples of mental availability—the ease with which a brand comes to mind in a buying situation, whether or not someone is actively shopping—at work. It’s what keeps brands top of mind when it matters most.
Brands can’t be chosen if they aren’t known, but awareness alone isn’t enough. Yahoo remains a well-known name in search, but when consumers need to look something up, they instinctively “Google it.” The critical difference between awareness and mental availability lies in being remembered in the moment of need. Awareness means consumers recognize a brand when they see it, but mental availability means the brand automatically comes to mind in buying or usage situations.
Mental availability builds over time. Brands with more distinctive creative assets and consistent presence have stronger salience. They come to mind easily and often across many category entry points—aka those moments when buyers enter the market, like when someone first thinks “I need running shoes” or “I’m out of paper towels.” Advertising helps drive this mental availability, going beyond brand awareness and keeping a product present in the mind when audiences are making or considering a purchase. Every impression, sound, and symbol compounds to make a brand easier to recall later.
Research shows that advertising awareness directly correlates to mental availability, which in turn results in tangible business outcomes. Specifically, there’s a measurable correlation between mental availability and market share: As brands become more mentally available, market share tends to follow. Familiarity breeds preference, and that preference translates to purchase behavior. The more a brand’s advertising is noticed and remembered—especially across different category entry points—the more space that brand holds in memory and the greater likelihood of being chosen when a purchase decision arises.
A strong example of mental availability at work is Heinz’s “Draw Ketchup” campaign. Instead of claiming to be the standard for ketchup, the brand proved it by asking audiences to draw ketchup. Nearly everyone drew some iteration of a Heinz bottle, and the brand launched a global campaign featuring the activation video as well as the drawings. That deep-rooted mental availability translated directly into business impact: The campaign drove double-digit increases in purchase intent and boosted market share despite price increases and rising competition.
Heinz’s success stemmed from leveraging the mental availability the brand had already built through decades of consistent marketing. The drawings demonstrated that Heinz not only had high brand awareness, but that it had, in fact, become the default mental representation of ketchup itself. When consumers thought “ketchup,” they pictured Heinz. The campaign simply made that unconscious association conscious and celebrated it, reinforcing existing memory structures and demonstrating how by focusing on mental availability, brands can become inseparable from the product itself.
Mental availability is built through consistency. It requires deliberate, sustained investment and effort to connect brands with the moments that matter to buyers.
Advertisers can strengthen mental availability through steady market presence rather than intermittent campaigns, reinforcing distinctive creative assets like colors, packaging, slogans, or sounds, and tracking recognition and recall as signals of future demand.
Brands should also consider multiple buying situations—both the obvious product need, as well as the contexts surrounding it. By seeking to understand where customers are when they need a product, what they’re trying to accomplish, and the emotions at play, teams can craft campaigns that connect brands to diverse category entry points.
In the end, growth comes from owning the moment when consumers think of your category. Advertising drives mental availability by ensuring brands are present in those critical moments.
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Long-term investments in brand awareness are critical for building mental availability. Yet amidst prolonged economic uncertainty, many budgets continue to lean heavily toward short-term performance. In Balancing Performance with Brand in Uncertain Times, we break down key considerations for marketing leaders as they strategize around their media investments.
Along with today’s rapidly changing advertising and marketing landscape, the role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is undergoing profound transformation. Once a critical pillar of organizational strategy focused on driving brand growth, the CMO’s scope of work has expanded considerably. Now, CMOs must navigate a steady stream of digital and technological innovation alongside evolving market conditions and a less than predictable consumer. This shift requires CMOs to transform into multifaceted leaders with responsibilities that go far beyond a legacy marketing role.
Today’s CMO is extending their skill set beyond more traditional brand-building expertise. They’re evolving into a cross-functional leader who’s able to unite their knack for strategic thinking with sound business logic to challenge the status quo and drive their brand forward. Brands that recognize and embrace the CMO in this evolving role are best positioned to unlock their full potential.
Historically, CMOs were brand stewards. They developed brand identity and voice, crafted go-to-market strategies, managed paid media efforts, and supported sales enablement while digging into campaign and market data to guide future strategies.
While these fundamentals remain central, the responsibilities of today’s CMOs have expanded to include leading the response to rapidly shifting market dynamics, evaluating when and where to implement new tech while staying rooted in meaningful areas of impact, and identifying which internal and external stakeholders to collaborate with to get the job done.
Indeed, modern CMOs have one of the most complex roles in an organization. They are expected to provide strategic guidance not only within marketing but also to consult across sales, finance, IT, product development, and human resources. And, they must bridge the gap between consumer-facing activities and internal business priorities, ensuring alignment to deliver meaningful results.
A CMO’s ability to manage these expanded responsibilities can differ by industry. For example, CMOs in the B2B space may find themselves uniquely well-suited for this shift, given the demand to unify their strategic backgrounds with their legacy focus on producing business outcomes. Basis CMO Katie McAdams notes, “B2B marketing has shifted from being viewed primarily as a sales enablement and lead generating function to becoming part of the design, implementation, and oversight of the company’s overarching strategy. The role and expectation of marketing today is to bring the product and sales strategies together to build alignment and ensure the implementation of a seamless go-to-market plan.”
An essential part of meeting these expectations for strategic excellence is effective communication with stakeholders. To communicate strategies and their outcomes effectively, CMOs must zero in on the most impactful stories they can tell and support them with meaningful data.
“The amount of data we can access across all our campaigns can be overwhelming, and it takes time to understand what to focus on," says McAdams. "Picking a few critical KPIs to prioritize and speak to regularly is key. Otherwise, you’ll end up overwhelming your team and other internal stakeholders with so many data points that they’ll just check out.” Establishing a shared source of truth—through common success metrics or a curated dashboard that the broader organization relies on—keeps everyone aligned on what success looks like.
Ultimately, today's CMO has evolved from a functional marketing expert into a strategic, multidisciplinary leader balancing a dual mandate: leveraging marketing expertise while taking on broader business leadership responsibilities that are integral to the organization’s success.
But as expectations rise, alignment across the C-suite hasn’t kept pace, limiting marketing’s influence at the highest levels.
The CMO’s evolution into a multifaceted business leader should, in theory, strengthen their position at the executive table. Yet paradoxically, even as organizations demand these broader capabilities from their CMOs, a troubling disconnect has emerged within executive teams. By one measure, the gap between CEOs and CMOs has widened by 20% in recent years, creating misalignment that directly impacts growth potential.
This disconnect shows up in multiple ways across organizations. For instance, 64% of CEOs say they feel comfortable with modern marketing, yet only 31% of CMOs think their CEOs actually are. Even more concerning, just half of CMOs participate in strategic planning sessions with their CEOs—despite evidence that companies involving marketing executives in such planning see 1.4 times higher revenue. Compounding this issue, many leaders believe marketing is underfunded even as investment as a share of sales has declined, creating a mismatch between growth expectations and the resources required to achieve them.
The divide extends beyond individual relationships. Executive teams have grown by 50% over the past five years, fragmenting customer ownership across multiple C-suite roles. Companies with a single, integrated customer-centric executive achieve 2.3 times the growth of those with overlapping responsibilities, yet many continue adding chiefs of digital, revenue, and customer experience alongside CMOs—blurring accountability and diluting marketing’s voice at the strategic table. This fragmentation stems from a critical gap in organizational infrastructure: Without common success metrics that all executives track and trust, each C-suite member defaults to their own measures and timelines for judging impact, making true alignment nearly impossible.
This fragmentation has left CMOs increasingly vulnerable. Despite the promise that an evolved CMO presents, the same conditions that have made today’s CMO a dynamic leader with a diverse toolkit have also put the role at risk.
Uncertainty surrounding the necessity of a CMO in today’s business climate has become evident as lines between the responsibilities of a CMO and those of other C-suite executives like the CFO and CTO have blurred. At the same time, profitability and cost-cutting demands have put the role under heightened scrutiny in several major companies. In recent years, Fortune 500 companies like McDonald's, UPS, and Johnson & Johnson have eliminated their CMO positions, often merging the role with other senior leadership roles like COO, and dividing out the responsibilities to address shifting business priorities in response to new technological and consumer demands. As a result of this trend, CMOs today must continually prove the value of their teams and their role within the organization. That scrutiny often shows up in budgets, where reduced investment can make it harder to demonstrate impact, further reinforcing questions about marketing’s seat at the table.
While the outlook may seem grim, the deeper truth is that businesses’ critical need for CMOs hasn’t disappeared, it’s just recalibrating to meet the evolving challenges of the landscape. Considering that just 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have a marketing background and only 41 of Fortune 1000 companies have a marketer on their board, this scarcity underscores the critical need for CMOs to provide the marketing expertise necessary for organizational success. If left unfulfilled, organizations will be left to feel the detrimental voids created by their absence.
A silver lining to the recent scrutiny? As brands reimagine or even reinstate the CMO—for example, McDonald’s quickly walked back their decision to eliminate the role—we’ve seen more hiring of first-time CMOs, particularly those promoted from within, to usher in a new era of leadership with the skillsets to match. Women have also been edging ahead, making up the majority of marketing leadership in six out of the nine industries analyzed by eMarketer.
The increasing complexity of the marketing ecosystem has placed a premium on technology. To maximize ROI, CMOs are increasingly investing in martech and adtech tools to improve efficiency and drive better results. However, these investments often fall short of their potential—not because they’re ineffective, but because the people using these platforms haven’t been adequately trained to do so. In fact, companies use just 56% of their martech investments, and 34% report that those tools underperform.
This underutilization underscores the importance of aligning technology with talent. CMOs should not only ensure their teams are equipped with the right tools, but also that there’s a plan in place to develop the skills to use them effectively. Upskilling and ongoing training are critical to closing the gap between tech investment and outcomes.
Adding to this complexity, the rise of AI is reshaping marketing team structures. As AI capabilities advance, some marketing roles are being replaced with the technology, making it crucial for CMOs to assess when to invest in talent development versus AI tools. This challenge of determining which capabilities remain uniquely human and which can be effectively automated makes strategic talent investment a critical priority for marketing leaders.
CMO spending priorities reflect this recognition. When asked how they would allocate an additional $1 million in 2024, CMOs most commonly said they would invest it in talent development. This reflects a growing understanding that people—not just technology—are key to unlocking the full potential of marketing innovations.
Finding the optimal balance between technology and talent is essential. CMOs who succeed in this area will drive both innovation and efficiency, ensuring their organizations stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Bridging the C-suite gap also requires CMOs to think beyond marketing metrics and tie their strategies directly to business outcomes. The pressure to deliver measurable business results is at an all-time high, with brands often prioritizing short-term revenue growth over long-term brand-building strategies. Caught in the middle are CMOs, whose legacies lie in carefully crafted long-term brand strategies but are now primarily tasked with producing revenue gains. The pandemic accelerated this trend, with the percentage of CMOs reporting that marketing is primarily responsible for revenue growth jumping almost 9% from February of 2020 to March of 2023. Alongside this, 75% of CMOs now rank short-term company commercial growth as their top priority.
However, this shift has come at a cost. A reported 41% reduction in brand-building spend from spring 2023 to spring 2024 indicates that CMOs are diverting resources from long-term initiatives to meet immediate performance goals. This creates a tension between achieving short-term wins and safeguarding the brand’s future equity—and long-term job security.
To navigate this challenge, CMOs must collaborate closely with CEOs, CFOs, and other senior leaders to align marketing strategies with broader business objectives. Agreeing on a small set of shared metrics—including revenue or margin growth—makes the business connection explicit and strengthens trust across the leadership team. By advocating for the critical needs filled by marketing and demonstrating the impact of marketing on both short-term revenue and long-term growth, CMOs can secure the resources and support needed to strike this delicate balance.
Rather than retreating under pressure, many CMOs are embracing a challenger mindset to redefine both their role and the industry around them.
Modern CMOs have a unique opportunity to challenge outdated practices and redefine industry norms. As change agents, they can ask bold questions, rethink legacy strategies, and drive transformative initiatives that set their organizations apart. This approach requires CMOs to push boundaries, disrupt the status quo, and champion innovation—all while maintaining alignment with organizational goals.
“Basis has embraced large-scale brand initiatives as part of its repositioning strategy,” says McAdams. “The success we’ve seen showcases how a challenger mindset can lead to significant market differentiation.”
To succeed as challengers, CMOs need strong support from key stakeholders within their organizations. Disruption often involves risk, and having the necessary backing is essential to ensuring these efforts lead to meaningful progress. McAdams says that her partnerships with Basis’ President, CEO, and CFO are critical: “Aligning the full leadership team with our go-to-market plan—and the investments required to make the big splashes we’ve envisioned—has allowed us to move faster and capitalize on opportunities as they present themselves.”
Ultimately, CMOs today can benefit from acting as disruptors. But to do so effectively, they'll need to cultivate the internal relationships necessary to ensure that their disruptive strategies can succeed.
Marketing has always been a tool for differentiation, but the modern CMO will elevate it into a strategic force that drives measurable business outcomes. By embracing expanded roles as cross-functional leaders, CMOs are uniquely positioned to unify internal priorities, align with organizational objectives, and deliver value in an ever-changing landscape.
Success for today’s CMO hinges on their ability to balance innovation with talent development, short-term gains with long-term growth, and tradition with transformation. As the business landscape continues to evolve, CMOs will remain the lynchpin connecting brand, customer, and company strategy—driving the future of both marketing and organizational success.
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The CMO’s evolution from marketing expert to strategic business leader brings opportunity alongside mounting pressure. As economic uncertainty tightens budgets, today’s CMOs must balance their expanded responsibilities while proving marketing’s impact on the bottom line. Our article, 3 Ways CMOs Can Cultivate C-Suite Buy-In Amidst Economic Uncertainty, explores how leaders can navigate this balance.
Advertising agencies are navigating economic pressure, rising client expectations, rapid AI innovation, and increased media complexity. To thrive, leaders must:
Executives from Basis share their insights below.
What hasn’t the world thrown at agencies of late? Years of economic instability: Check. Tariffs and declining consumer sentiment: Check. Mounting signal loss, compounded by Google flip-flopping on third-party cookies for half a decade: Check. The explosion of generative AI, rising rates from media partners, reduced client budgets, and media fragmentation: Check, check, check, and check.
Despite these pressures, most agency leaders remain optimistic, with 76.8% feeling confident about the future of their businesses—though, notably, this marks a slight decline from last year's 82.4%. But the ongoing upheaval is taking its toll on agency staff: Over three-quarters of agency professionals say their jobs have gotten harder in the past two years, and six in 10 say that digital advertising in general has grown more difficult in that same time span.
However, periods of change often provide opportunities for growth and innovation, and agency leaders can leverage the forces reshaping the industry to gain a competitive edge over those who may be more hesitant to embrace those shifts. The question is, how can they approach this evolution thoughtfully and strategically, despite the many unknowns?
To find out, we spoke with five industry veterans about what agency leaders need to know in this moment, and how they can situate their organizations to not only adapt as the industry transforms, but thrive in this new environment.
Key questions answered include:
April Weeks | Chief Investment & Media Officer - Basis: The biggest pressures facing agencies today are driving business growth while simultaneously finding operational efficiencies and meeting increasing client demands. Economic uncertainty, declining consumer loyalty, and rising labor costs have only intensified these challenges.
Many organizations now view artificial intelligence as a potential solution to these pressures—particularly through agentic capabilities—and the expectation for time and cost savings through automation and AI solutions is increasingly top of mind for clients, though in some cases it’s outpacing the reality of where agencies are today. This is forcing agencies to reevaluate traditional approaches to winning and retaining business and explore new models for how they support the business cost efficiently, all while delivering the desired business outcomes.
Katie McAdams | Chief Marketing Officer - Basis: Fragmentation and the proliferation of platforms required to execute and manage media have advanced at a pace agencies are struggling to keep up with. At the same time, agencies are under pressure to drive profit, growth, and media spend.
Along with this, there are a variety of challenges agencies are facing related to AI adoption. There’s still a lot of uncertainty around how AI is going to impact how agency teams will be structured, so leaders are assessing where to add headcount versus where AI can lead. These are big questions they’re grappling with around the role AI will play in this new environment versus where people are most effective. Adding to the complexity, the market has been flooded with new AI solutions and leaders are trying to weed through to see what’s real and what’s vaporware.
Ryan Manchee | SVP, Brand Marketing - Basis: Agencies are being asked to do more with less. Client demands have increased, and relationships are shifting from AOR to project-based, challenging the economics of the agency model. Savvy agencies are creating new revenue streams—from data plays for enhanced addressability to advanced analytics that prove outcomes—but many are still struggling to stay ahead and effectively grow their businesses.
Compounding these pressures, the rise of AI and automation is rapidly changing what brands need from their agencies and how agencies deploy their teams. Many agency leaders are hesitant to hire more employees until they understand how these new tools and processes will impact their business.
Michael Olson | EVP, Client Development – Basis: The rise of AI and increasing complexity in the media landscape are two major forces pushing agencies to evolve.
When it comes to AI, agencies are trying to find the balance between what AI can and cannot replace in terms of human labor. The market has shifted from revenue at all costs to profitability, so companies don’t want to add any incremental employee costs if they don’t have to. But on the flip side, many agency contracts with brands are still in the FTE model—so those are opposing forces.
At the same time, the media landscape is growing more complex. The rise of retail media networks across all verticals, agentic AI, and competition between DSPs and SSPs are fragmenting the space. RMNs and agentic AI also adding walled gardens to advertisers’ media mixes. Other channels are rapidly evolving as well: For example, Comcast recently introduced programmatic advertising for linear TV through FreeWheel, and I think we’re going to see a real shift in 2026 of linear dollars increasingly being bought through ad tech platforms.
Overall, there’s just so much change happening in the industry on the tech side, and it’s a real challenge for agencies to keep track of and adapt to while pitching new business and ensuring the balance sheet is strong.
AW: Agencies should be evaluating their approach to technology and how they deliver value to clients. Waiting to see where the industry goes next and specifically how to integrate automation, whether through AI or other technology solutions, will only make the agency more vulnerable in the future. As the rate of change continues to increase, agencies should embrace a test and learn approach, take smart risks, learn quickly, fail fast, and remain agile.
KM: One major way agencies can stay competitive and future-oriented is by understanding and embracing brands’ desire for transparency. Agencies should be building their cost structures in a way that anticipates client expectations for transparency in everything from pricing to cost of paid media to cost of data and beyond. Brands know there are platforms out there that provide that level of transparency, and they’re only going to demand it more and more.
RM: As an industry, we’re often too focused on innovation of technology over the importance of intersecting with culture. Brands hire agencies for a variety of reasons, one of them being their ability to stay on top of what’s new and what’s coming up ahead. This can be a key differentiator: Agencies can help increase brand memorability and drive culture by aligning a brand's products or services with key moments, from tentpole sporting events like the Super Bowl and World Cup to breakthrough moments in pop culture. The agencies that keep this aspect of their service in focus have been and will stay competitive and successful.
MO: The number one priority for agencies these days is top line growth while maintaining healthy and growing EBITDA margins. In general, employee growth and employee experience have taken a back seat to profitability. And of course, making sure revenue turns into profit is incredibly important, because if you don’t do that you can’t provide an environment for organizational culture to thrive.
However, to drive this growth, agencies cannot lose sight of their talent. There’s an old adage that says, “Your most valuable assets get in the elevator and walk out the door every day.” Agencies must maintain focus on their talent, because ultimately, those are the people who are going to help them keep their clients and win new clients to make that top line growth happen.
Part of maintaining focus on talent means preparing employees for an evolving industry. That means it’s critical for agency leaders to ensure their teams are learning how to work with AI. AI will come for some jobs, but in most cases, it's not going to be AI that replaces people—it's going to be people who are better at leveraging AI.
Lauren Johnson | Client Strategy & Effectiveness Lead - Basis: When I'm thinking about how agencies need to evolve, I think about how they need to be able to answer the hard questions.
Brands will continue to push agency partners to validate both their investment decisions and their creative decisions. They’re focused on understanding the business outcomes of their media investments. That's why agencies' creativity needs to be rooted in a place of effectiveness: shaping strong POVs for testing and learning, developing experiments to validate decisions, and creative problem-solving across investments both small and large. Creativity, new ideas, thought leadership, and effective media plans that build client confidence should be focus areas.
At the same time, agencies exist to help brands grow, and in today's landscape that means they must embrace change and try new things by leveraging technology—from AI to modeling technology to automation—to find new solutions to the same problems.
AW: CMOs are under a tremendous amount of pressure. They are expected to be a Swiss Army knife when it comes to knowing what is happening across their business, the industry, the next emerging trend, and how to outsmart their competition—and often with far less budget than what they need. The expectation to show meaningful business outcomes and justify every dollar is higher than ever.
Agencies need to recognize these pressures and come to the table with solutions that highlight marketing as a revenue generating function versus a cost center. Doing this requires a true partnership with clear agreements on the business problems to be solved, the performance expectations to be met, and a plan to do so. Agencies also need to help brands understand and navigate the evolving media landscape, and in turn, brands need to support agencies with appropriate staffing and timelines.
RM: Many agencies have embraced expertise they’ve gained working with brands in certain categories or verticals. This has helped them differentiate and enabled them to go deeper with their existing and prospective clients.
With economic turbulence and supply challenges, many brands are also scaling back their long-term planning. This may help them to stay nimble and see short-term positive results, but it will have an impact on their brand-building efforts that take time, investment, and smart planning. Agency teams who can balance the short- and long-term planning, while leaning on their growing expertise, will see the biggest gains.
LJ: Brands’ marketing teams are more stressed than ever. They don’t have the budgets they need to meet their goals, they are expected to be experts on all things media, and they are under pressure to navigate the noise of an increasingly complex landscape.
This stressed state means brands are looking for more than just agency partnerships that can activate media with efficiency. They are looking for strategic partners that make them smarter and more confident in their marketing decisions. At the same time, they want smart, simple solutions that cut through the noise and resonate at the executive level.
Moving into 2026, agencies must commit to providing meaningful business-level partnerships that help clients navigate through all the complexity and upheaval that characterizes the industry today. Forward-thinking agencies will be using every engagement to share how advertising is impacting their clients’ business, offering up new solutions backed by innovative thinking, and elevating client conversations beyond lower-level topics—such as short-term KPIs and allocating budget into different media channels—that don’t hold weight with bigger business conversations.
AW: Driving business growth and creating efficiencies are certainly top of mind. How can agencies deliver more value cost efficiently? What are the mechanisms to generate cost savings and efficiency within their business, while balancing increasing labor costs with economic pressures? As a result, many agencies are looking for bigger client wins, ways to outsource some functions, or offload less profitable accounts.
MO: The following topics are forefront in agency leaders’ minds: Offsetting costs and growing revenue with AI tools, systems and platforms; ensuring they have the right talent that knows how to leverage those tools, systems, and platforms for efficiency and gain; reducing the cost to pitch and win new business; navigating the ever-changing landscape of media activation, reporting, and reconciliation; and ensuring they have the right outcome-based partnerships with all their vendors and platforms to provide strategic value back to their brands.
In terms of how agency leaders are thinking about evolving, it all comes down to getting clear on what their business excels at, and then doubling down with smart tech and good talent. Leaders should also reduce efforts to try and boil the ocean, which tends to end with results that are just OK.
AW: AI and agentic solutions are reshaping how deliverables are created, as well as their associated timelines and costs. Work that currently requires multiple teams is being condensed to fewer people and shorter timelines.
KM: Gen AI is now being used across every part of the digital media process. But for many agencies, that constitutes a variety of stitched-together point solutions, which results in a significant amount of complexity. Considering this, the smartest agencies are working to figure out how to reduce that complexity and weave gen AI as seamlessly as possible into their existing tech stacks.
At the same time, clients are going to be asking how agencies are using AI to drive effectiveness and efficiency, so the ways agencies are integrating gen AI—and agentic AI as well—into their operations needs to be part of their pitch.
RM: Mitigating the mundane and monotonous to free up time for the fun and fantastic. As AI and automation deliver on that promise, agencies will be well positioned for growth, and for their team’s growth.
Through automation, there’s an opportunity to reevaluate where talent is best utilized and to shift employees’ time to high-value tasks. Within the last six months, we’ve also seen the emergence of agentic AI that can impact day-to-day business operations, allowing teams to rethink how they prioritize their time and efforts.
MO: Humans should not be completely removed from the equation. The magic place we want to get to is a beneficial blend of AI and humans to ensure efficiencies throughout the agency. Shifting employee responsibilities from low-value work to high-value strategic work will not only empower them to grow, but also allow businesses to reduce costs needed to pay people for low-value activities that machines can do quickly and accurately.
When it comes to AI, agencies also need to be able to see through the fluff. There’s a lot of vaporware in the market right now, and a lot of shiny new toys. It’s going to be critically important for agencies to be able to evaluate which tools can offer real value.
Being able to move faster and achieve more is what’s most important. The agencies who figure out how to integrate their AI in a way where 1+1=5 will be best positioned for success. I could argue that with how rapidly AI is accelerating code development, any agency can build custom technology with minimal financial investment to help usher their agency into a new era.
AW: Agencies should take an agile approach to their organization design based on where AI can deliver efficiency. As media continues to converge and more channels can be executed programmatically, agencies will need to work to remove siloes to more effectively deliver holistic recommendations focused on achievement of business outcomes.
In terms of the next generation of agency professionals, I believe that curiosity will remain a highly valuable skillset. Remaining open to new ways of planning and activating will be essential, as agentic AI’s ability to automate tasks will fundamentally reshape advertisers’ workflows. In general, embracing AI tools and solutions to support new ways of working will be an expectation for all agency professionals. As certain responsibilities become automated, the next generation of agency advertisers will have the opportunity to reshape where they spend time to drive value.
KM: Agency leaders should be curating teams that can keep up with a rapid pace of change and seeking out the kind of people who are going to run towards change versus resist it. Employees who are resistant to change can hold the whole team back.
This is about creating a culture where embracing change is the norm. Leaders should be thinking about how to curate an environment that is conducive to people seeing change as a growth vehicle for themselves rather than something that they should be afraid of. They might even think about incentivizing that kind of behavior.
AW: We’re experiencing a period of rapid evolution. The agency of the future will have technology and AI as a crucial point of all operations, with talent well-versed and comfortable using AI tools to derive solutions. Creative and content, influencer marketing, and media will become more tightly connected and we will continue to see convergence of media across planning and activation, leading to hybrid roles within agencies.
KM: The agencies that are going to win new business in this new era of advertising are those who have figured out how to integrate gen AI and agentic AI into their operations in a way that constitutes a kind of “secret sauce” that sets them apart from other agencies.
MO: There are so many tech-related evolutions happening in the industry right now, but agencies need to keep their focus on acting as trusted advisors to their clients to achieve their desired outcomes.
I also think that an agency’s ability to provide excellent service is going to be a differentiator. Chatbots and agentic AI are increasingly being used to streamline communications—which can be incredibly valuable—but providing that human touch and stand-out service is absolutely critical.
While the best approach to evolution will vary based on each agency’s characteristics, strengths, and goals, there are a few north stars leaders can follow to ensure they aren’t left behind. These include maintaining focus on the wellbeing and retention of agency staff, as well as investing strategically in AI- and automation-driven tools designed to make teams more efficient. By leaning into these strategies, advertising leaders will position their organizations to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, stay ahead of competitors, and foster a culture of innovation that keeps their teams engaged and their clients satisfied.
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There’s so much more to explore when it comes to the current state of advertising agencies and how they’re set to evolve in the coming years. To dive deeper, we surveyed advertising industry professionals from across the US to find out how they feel about their jobs, their agencies, and the current trajectory of the digital advertising industry. Discover all the top insights in our 2025 Advertising Agency Report.
See how CloudControlMedia launched new digital campaigns with CTV for Abilene Christian University, resulting in a 42% increase in spend year over year.
CloudControlMedia (CCM) is a performance-based digital marketing agency with expertise in higher education and home services, serving clients including Abilene Christian University, The New School, and others. They offer a full suite of digital marketing services, including SEM, SEO, email, social media, CRO, content development, creative services, and analytics.
CloudControlMedia’s higher ed clients leaned on lower-funnel tactics. The CCM team needed to prove that CTV, OTT, and display could drive conversions and close major attribution gaps along the way.
CloudControlMedia turned to Basis to launch new digital campaigns for its client, Abilene Christian University.
CloudControlMedia partnered with Abilene Christian University to shifted dollars from pure lead gen-oriented tactics into awareness campaigns that proved bottom-funnel impact.
The results:
With Basis, CloudControlMedia closed attribution gaps, proved CTV’s impact, and powered new growth:
"The Basis team was prompt, thorough, and went above and beyond with all the requests we had, from serving as a reliable research partner to looping in their team of SMEs for insights on any high-level programmatic strategies." - CloudControlMedia
The past five years in media and marketing have been marked by both progress and paradox. As the industry races ahead, it’s also circling back: revisiting old predictions, re-evaluating what didn’t land, and rethinking what innovation really means.
In this webinar, Noor Naseer and Kaitlin O’Brien from Basis’ Media Innovations & Technology team take a clear-eyed look at the forces shaping 2026. Rewind to Fast Forward explores how advertisers are returning to long-standing challenges and unfinished innovations that now define forward momentum. As sophistication replaces scale, the next wave of growth will come from mastering quality, precision, intelligence, and authenticity—not just chasing what’s next.
Watch now to gain a grounded perspective on the trends that will shape 2026—and how to translate them into meaningful, measurable impact in the year ahead.
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Looking for more trends content? Check out our 2026 Trends Report today!
