Choosing a digital marketing agency can be very challenging in a fast moving technological and media landscape.
In July 2023, I wrote an opinion piece for AdNews discussing the challenges of choosing a digital agency. In that article I covered some of the risks of choosing an agency that is over-reliant on Google and Meta and how marketers should ensure they look closely at the agency’s capabilities, data partnerships and core expertise to ensure they get the best specialist agency for their needs. One of the largest pitfalls I covered at the time was that many agencies claim they are a full service agency whereas in reality they have a very limited media offering and are reliant almost exclusively on Google and Meta for their media offering.
Recently, the marketing landscape has been impacted by significant regulatory and technological changes that make choosing a digital marketing agency even more complex due to the following industry shifts:
- Google has delayed further deprecation of third-party cookies
- Australia’s Privacy Law Reforms loom and are expected to be confirmed an announced by the Australian government no later than 2025
- The US government has initiated antitrust actions aimed at breaking up Google due to their monopolistic behaviour and control of the Search Engine ecosystem.
These shifts prompt a fresh look at the complexities marketers face when assessing agency capabilities and how industry trends should inform decisions. These industry changes are likely to further erode the effectiveness of agencies that rely on Google, and for that matter Meta, for the majority of their clients’ marketing activity. The recent industry regulatory changes necessitate broadening the advertising approach of brands towards digital marketing platforms that are less reliant on Google data and their affiliated publishers. This article will provide practical tips for marketers on how to navigate these changes and what factors need to be considered when choosing a digital marketing agency.
Choosing a Leading Creative and Media Agency: What’s Best for Your Brand
When evaluating a potential agency partner, it’s essential to understand the broader agency landscape. Marketing agencies typically fall into two categories:
- Independent Agencies – These are smaller agencies where often the founders of the business are still involved in day-to-day operations. Independent agencies are usually highly specialised and offer more personalised service levels.
- Holding Companies (Agency Groups) – large, international conglomerates with multiple specialised agencies under their umbrella—ranging from UX design to media buying or B2B services. Holding companies, while offering a breadth of services, may sometimes feel more impersonal, with lower client and staff retention rates.
Among independent agencies, the distinction often lies between those that lead with creative services and those that are experts in media buying at their core. Although there are niche agencies specialising in areas like SEO, video production, or UX, most brands view creative and media agencies as their core strategic partners. Indeed for most brands, create and media tend to attract the lion share of marketing investment. These two core agencies are often referred to as “agency of record” by the brands they work with.
One of the first decisions marketers face is determining whether media or creative is central to their marketing strategy. Ideally, brands should partner with both a creative and media agency rather than seeking an all-in-one solution, as specialisation leads to better results.
Additional criteria to consider in evaluating a core agency of record:
- Agency Collaboration – When selecting an agency consider how well the agency is likely to work with your internal team and external partners. This becomes a critical point for marketing strategy, creative testing, optimising messaging and reporting. Does the agency have a strong record of collaborating with other agencies or partners? Do they have a data led approach to testing creative and audiences?
- Data Activation – a data led agency should have a clear focus on leveraging your brand data to improve campaign results and test new ideas. Consider their ability to utilise your CRM data to create lookalike audiences and exclude existing customers from certain campaigns. Some other areas to explore include: Will they be activating 1st party data in their campaigns? How will they protect your customer data? Do they use Data Clean Rooms or hashed audience lists?
- Brand Tech Stack – A specialist marketing agency should have the knowledge and experience to work with multiple tech stacks. They should have experience with attribution modelling, working with a wide range of CDP’s (Customer data Platform) and DMP’s (Data Management Platform) in an agnostic capacity. Consider checking with a prospective agency: What CDP or DMP’s do they have experience with? Have they worked with Marketing Mix Modelling and with which vendors? What Attribution modelling do they recommend? Do they incorporate brand lift studies or Brand Intent Measurement in their media campaigns?
The above list should be created for your unique brand’s needs and is highly dependent on the complexity of your marketing operations and internal team capabilities.
What a Full-Service Agency Should Really Offer (And What to Watch Out For)
Most agencies have roots in a particular discipline and have over time expanded their offering to other disciplines. When evaluating a digital agency or requesting RFP submissions, it’s important to look at the core service of each agency and identify their core offering. Most agencies fall into three main types:
- Full Service Agency – Offers a full range of services including Creative and Media at the very least.
- Creative Agency – Focuses on creative and brand strategy but may also offer some more limited media services.
- Media Agency – Focused on media and publishers relationships but may also have a limited creative or brand focus.
While many agencies label themselves as a “full service agency”, each has a core area of expertise. A true full-service agency should have in-house expertise across all aspects of marketing, from strategy to execution. However, marketers should critically evaluate this claim. Often, creative agencies outsource media buying to third-party specialists or run it as a managed service. To assess whether an agency truly has in-house media expertise, ask whether they have actual media buyers on staff or merely a planning team that outsources buying and optimisation.
A further consideration is whether the agency operates as an agnostic media agency or is closely tied to a particular platform—most often Google. Agencies designated as “Google Premier” partners may have to meet specific spend thresholds, which can lead to a bias in their media plans. If an agency’s media strategy overly emphasises Google and Meta’s walled gardens, this should raise red flags.
A true full-service agency should showcase versatility, offering a comprehensive range of services that go beyond the dominant platforms. By diversifying their media capabilities, these agencies can craft more robust and impactful marketing strategies. This can be achieved either by expanding their partnerships beyond Google and Meta or by collaborating with a specialised, agnostic digital marketing agency that brings sophisticated data integrations and media expertise.
A sophisticated and technologically savvy media agency should educate the brand marketing team on how to get the most of each platform and data provider to improve targeting given they are the experts in media buying across a large number of clients and industries.
Avoiding Marketing Platform Dependency: Why an Agnostic Media Agency Matters
As discussed earlier, many agencies have a media offering that is highly reliant on Google and Meta. If a marketing agency’s media offering is reliant on Google and Meta and the majority of its media investment is concentrated on these two companies, this a sure sign of Platform Dependency and lack of media innovation and diversification. A lack of media diversification can pose high risks to achieving decent Marketing Return on Media Investment. This is due to increased bidding competition within these two platforms and shortage of media inventory.
Partnering with an agnostic media agency reduces the risk of bias and ensures that your campaigns benefit from a broader range of platforms. Relying too heavily on Google—where both measurement tools (e.g., Google Analytics) and media inventory are controlled by the same entity—can distort performance insights, making Google’s ecosystem seem more favourable. While Google is undoubtedly a major player in digital marketing, an over-reliance on their technology can expose brands to risks, especially as privacy regulations tighten and data sharing becomes more restricted.
Working across a diverse range of digital media platforms—those that operate in the open internet—offers more accurate measurement and transparency. It allows agencies and brands to shift budgets to higher-performing publishers and data providers while leveraging data across different campaign elements for deeper marketing insights.
Future-Proofing for a Cookieless & Privacy Centric World
As third-party cookies phase out and privacy regulations become stricter, marketers need to ensure their agencies are ready for the next wave of digital advertising. When evaluating a potential partner, ask about their approach to first-party data usage, how they safeguard CRM data, and how they plan to navigate a post-cookie world. Ideally, you want an agency that is proactive, already diversifying its media buys to rely less on third-party tracking.
There are a number of strategies to prepare for this inevitable new privacy and regulatory change:
Non-Cookie targeting Solutions – those solutions relying on publisher 1st party data or contextual targeting are making a strong comeback. These solutions are highly reliable and are based on actual data relating to environments the user is logged into. They are also less susceptible to users switching or sharing devices, deleting cookies or installing as blockers.
Owned Data – Using a DMP or CDP which can be enriched with data on an ongoing basis can replace a lot of the cookies based approaches and result in more accurate targeting of ads. It also helps reduce advertising waste and only show someone ads based on their purchase history.
Using more sophisticated ID solutions – Many of the ad buying platforms such as Meta, Yahoo, The Trade Desk, Amazon and others have been progressively moving to their own identity solutions. By ensuring your advertising is using a diverse range of media buying platforms you will be able to reduce any negative impact as we move into a cookieless future.
The marketing and media industry is changing rapidly, and the agency you choose should be agile enough to adapt and help you thrive in this new cookieless and privacy centric world. Markets need to be constantly evaluating the changing landscape to future proof their marketing campaigns and adjust to changing media and consumer trends. It’s useful for markets to consider how cookieless tracking constraints will impact their ad performance.
A good first step is to understand what percentage of your ad spend is likely to get impacted and to check how reliant you are on cookie based tracking.
Once you have assessed your current risk profile, you should be assessing whether your media agency is prepared for this shift and how proactive they are in tackling it. You should also be looking at alternative media agencies and what their approach is to these changes.
Ultimately, a media agency which has strong data partnerships and low platform dependency will be more prepared for a cookieless future. Marketers should also interrogate what first party data strategies their agency uses and whether they support integrations with CDP’s to enrich and utilise your first party data. Some areas that could shed light on your media agency’s level of preparedness are whether they support Clean Rooms as a way to safely exchange and access PII data and whether the suppliers have proprietary Universal ID solutions that are non-cookie reliant.
In a rapidly evolving marketing landscape defined by a cookieless future, stringent privacy regulations, and an increasingly diversified media ecosystem, the right agency partnership has never been more critical. Today’s challenges demand not only technical expertise but also a proactive, forward-thinking approach to navigate shifting consumer behaviour and regulatory frameworks. Whether you’re already working with an agency or considering a new partnership, now is the time to assess if your agency is equipped to adapt to these changes.
If you’d like our team to assist you with evaluating your existing agency’s level of readiness to a cookieless marketing world or how an alternative privacy approach might benefit your brand’s marketing efforts we would love to hear from you.
