Advertising Agencies
Traditional advertising agencies find their business models under threat. But advertising agencies still deliver services crucial to brands. Read our insights on M&As, trends, and case studies to understand the direction of agencies.
Insights
Blog
The Cost Of AI Productivity Is Less Creativity
AI is now standard across marketing agencies — but its impact remains constrained. Forrester’s “The State Of AI Inside US Marketing Agencies, 2026” finds that CMOs must shift their AI ambitions toward creativity, differentiation, and growth to unlock real value.
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AI Forces A Redesign Of How Marketing And Agencies Work
As CMOs take on greater responsibility for AI-driven business outcomes, they must lead changes in how marketing is structured, executed, and measured. This is exposing a gap between what CMOs need and what traditional agencies deliver, creating an opportunity for a new class of partner focused on transformation, not just execution.
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Google Dethrones OpenAI As Agencies’ Preferred AI Partner
New Forrester and 4As research shows that agencies are prioritizing ecosystems that connect data, creative, media, and commerce at scale, with Google emerging as the leading partner. As marketing moves from isolated tools to integrated operating systems, the ability to orchestrate end-to-end workflows is becoming the new competitive edge.
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Ad Creative Is A Technology Problem And Opportunity
The market for creative advertising technologies should have boomed by now. Despite waves of innovation, it has struggled to translate technological promise into business outcomes. Its potential remains highly significant but constrained by cultural disconnects between creative and media subject matter experts (SMEs) and intransigent bottlenecks in creative and media processes. The market appeared poised […]
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From Walled Gardens To Working Media: The Rise Of Commerce Media
In less than a decade, retail media evolved from a monetization tactic piloted by margin-seeking mass retailers into one of advertising’s fastest-growing channels. By nearly every surface-level metric, retail media works. Marketers shifted billions of co-op funds into it, lured by the promise of closed-loop measurement and higher return on relationships with merchants. But beneath […]
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Publicis Acquires LiveRamp To Advance New Agentic AI Push
Publicis Groupe has agreed to acquire data collaboration and identity resolution firm LiveRamp for $2.55 billion in a move aimed to expand the agency holding company’s artificial intelligence offering. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, following the customary regulatory and shareholder approvals. Publicis will operate LiveRamp as an independent company […]
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GenAI Is Rebuilding Search, And Google is Still Winning (Q1 2026 Search Revenue Up 19% YoY)
Every tech cycle needs a good funeral: a villain to bury and a hero to crown. In genAI’s version of the story, kill advertising (again) and Google (search) is dead. The plot is tidy: GenAI replaces searching, ads become obsolete, and the web finally escapes the “attention tax.” It’s a satisfying story. Clean. Moral. Wrong. […]
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What The History Of Ad Agencies Tells Us About CMO Power: Order-Takers To Strategic Partners — And Back Again
A Love Story Older Than Television The tension between CMOs and advertising agencies didn’t start with AI, procurement, or any media disruption. And history makes one thing clear: Agencies only gain power when CMOs don’t — or can’t — fully exercise theirs. It’s embedded in the very origin of the advertising agency itself. To understand […]
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Omnichannel Ad Platforms: The Future Beyond DSPs
The market for omnichannel demand-side platforms (DSPs) has reached its limit. Pioneers like The Trade Desk and its erstwhile rivals — including the likes of MediaMath, Rocket Fuel, TubeMogul, Turn, and Xandr — grew by accelerating cross-channel media planning, buying, and optimization. Now, DSPs’ core capabilities are very mature and highly automatable. Vendors focused primarily […]
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CMOs’ “AI Creative Leap”: From Making Ads To Designing Meaning
As AI absorbs execution at scale, creativity returns to its highest value. The brands that win will automate production while doubling down on insight, narrative, and the judgment that protects meaning.
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Marketing Chaos Is Our Calling: Why CMOs, Agencies, And Martech Have Forrester On Their Side
Forrester uniquely covers the entire marketing ecosystem and its underlying business. 2026 heralds a monumental shift in marketing and advertising, surpassing the decades-long “digital” transformation. AI will upend commercial models, reshape brand expectations from partners, and demand new measures of efficient growth. CMOs face the herculean task of rewiring the marketing function. Martech leaders must […]
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It’s “Grow-Time” For Omnicom Group And Its Customers
Omnicom enters its first earnings cycle after the IPG acquisition with scale, momentum, and unresolved operational challenges. CMOs should ignore Wall Street’s fixation on quarterly performance and instead evaluate how Omnicom plans to convert its expanded capabilities into customer growth. Despite its new size, the company still faces the same structural barriers constraining the broader […]
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From AI To Tight Ends: Super Bowl LX’s Growth Winners
Another Super Bowl in the books, and we’re left asking ourselves questions like, “Who had a better night — artificial intelligence or the Backstreet Boys’ agent?” While the industry makeup of Super Bowl ads shifted, some things never change — like the use of spokes-animals and celebrity-fueled ’90s nostalgia, plus the need for advertisers to […]
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The Truth About Principal Media
Love it or hate it, principal media is a necessity for agencies, advertisers, and publishers grappling with revenue and budget uncertainty.
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Seven Roles, One Goal: How To Organize For Answer Engine Optimization
AEO demands broader, more intensive collaboration than SEO. Learn how roles should change and where they should intersect in a zero-click world.
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A Big Bang Reshapes Agencies Into Algorithms Of Record
Fierce competition, shrinking margins, and technological change has contracted the agency landscape all while agencies' remits vastly expand. All the while, a new concept is taking shape.
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Adobe’s Firefly Foundry Reveals A Creative Technology Split Screen
Adobe's new managed service offering bucks a growing self-service trend and elevates the human element in AI development.
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The Next Wave: DSPs Become Omnichannel Ad Platforms
The conditions that sustained demand-side platforms (DSPs) are no more. Learn what's changed, and how we evaluated vendors in our recent Landscape report.
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Zero-Click Search Comes For Checkout: Agentic Commerce Automates Retail’s Next Frontier
Agentic commerce is spreading as OpenAI launches Instant Checkout offering shoppers conversational shopping from curiosity to checkout without redirecting consumers to merchants’ sites. Find out what this means and how B2C marketers are responding in this post.
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Predictions 2026: Marketing Agencies Resign Their Agency
By the end of the coming year, marketing agencies will have materially changed. For CMOs, agencies will no longer act solely as your agents but also as owners of solutions, resellers of technology partnerships, and developers of emerging capabilities.
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