2025 Advertising Agency Report

2025 is shaping up to be a critical year for advertising agencies.

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, we 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. This report explores those findings while providing agency leaders with actionable, data-driven insights to navigate this changing landscape and position themselves for sustainable growth in the years ahead.

Select findings include:

• Increasing Difficulty: Amidst growing complexity and rising client expectations, 60.8% of professionals believe digital advertising has gotten harder over the past two years, while 76.6% feel their individual jobs have grown more challenging.
• Client Relationships Under Pressure: Over half (50.9%) of agencies say their client relationships are more strained today than they were two years ago.
• Brand Safety Concerns: As advertisers confront the growing threats of AI-generated misinformation, hate speech and rolled-back content moderation efforts on social media platforms, 85.3% of agency professionals believe brand safety risks are greater today than they were at this time last year, with nearly two-thirds of all respondents (63.7%) believing they are significantly higher.
• Operational Inefficiencies: Agencies cite inefficient processes (56.1%) as the top challenge currently facing their organization.
• Industry Confidence: 56.1% of professionals feel optimistic about the future of digital advertising, down from 62.8% in 2024.
• Investment Priorities: 75.6% of agency leaders say they plan to increase investment in AI tools in the next 12 months.

Download the full report today to get more insights into the state of advertising agencies, as well as key takeaways and strategic opportunities based on the findings.