Media continues to be a flywheel for growth and integration, especially when marketers and providers work together to combine expertise and capabilities into a full-funnel marketing strategy. Crucial to that success is uniting the scale of trading, technology, and execution with the skill of planning, intelligence, and optimization.

Marketers are ready to move beyond choosing between full-service media generalists wielding buying power and agnostic execution or channel specialists offering subject matter expertise for search, social media, or performance marketing. Nearly half of US marketing executives prefer a single agency partner to provide brand and performance media assignments. They want fewer partners to manage, reduced fees, and better marketing experiences. Providers are responding with offerings that integrate precision with persuasion, intelligence with content production, and technology with ingenuity to help marketers realize efficiency and growth.

What characteristics should marketing executives keep in mind when evaluating their agency or looking for a provider?

  • Look for agencies that convert buying power into buying intelligence. Paid media represents the largest portion of most marketing budgets. In the past, media billings translated to preferred rates. Today, it also provides access to performance guarantees, technology co-development opportunities, and audience insights. Today’s media management providers combine data strategy and agency audience activation platforms, transforming buying power into buying intelligence as they grow “up” funnel or add expertise.
  • Prioritize providers that connect media insight to creative development. Technology strategy is crucial for all media management providers. Proprietary audience platforms, powered by machine learning and first-party, third-party, and transactional data sources — combined with generative AI — become marketing operating systems to guide media planning, activation, and reporting. The best media management providers use operating systems to guide creative and content development, (re-)uniting media and creative.
  • Identify partners that offer mutually beneficial, outcomes-focused commercial models. The growing influx of technology in marketing’s and agencies’ pursuit of software solutions creates the opportunity to innovate the agency commercial model. Providers are responding with performance- and outcomes-based remuneration options. These reward co-innovation and provide mutual reward. The best providers offer a range of options, with an eye toward outcomes models to align objectives.
  • Only hire providers that use principal media in a transparent manner. Mutual benefit, trust, and visibility must be tenets of principal media buying products and deals. Principal media is when the media management provider invests in media inventory — often at a substantial discount — and resells that inventory to clients — often with a markup that is still below the baseline cost. When executed in an open and transparent manner, principal media can offer marketers benefits such as reduced rates, exclusives, and performance guarantees while offering the provider additional margin. When executed in a nontransparent and opaque way, principal media practices raise questions about whether the provider is acting in the brand’s best interests both financially and strategically. The best providers recommend principal media solutions sparingly, are transparent in its practices, and work to educate and inform marketers about how and when to use such solutions.

The Media Management Services Evaluation Showcases Changes To The Forrester Wave™

The Forrester Wave™: Media Management Services, Q4 2024, provides clients the opportunity to dive deep into the progression toward full-funnel media capabilities by evaluating 12 prominent agencies, including the global holding company agency groups and private equity-backed independent media agencies. It also debuts new innovations in experience and format. The new Wave graphic:

 

  • Declares each provider as a Leader, Strong Performer, or Contender. Forrester’s Wave graphic now shows three bands instead of four, which better highlights our calls about where vendors or providers sit in a market relative to their peers and aligns with our three-point scoring rubric. All evaluated providers in the media management services Wave are ranked as Leaders, Strong Performers, or Contenders.
  • Showcases in-depth customer feedback. Forrester’s Wave graphic now highlights the quality and caliber of provider reference customers, as well as ongoing feedback that Forrester collects outside of the Wave process, with more prominent markers on the Wave graphic. In the media management Wave, PMG is a customer favorite in this evaluation, with Omnicom Media Group and Publicis Groupe recognized for superior customer feedback.
  • Complements an interactive Wave digital experience. Forrester clients can now easily move from the classic Forrester Wave report to an interactive digital experience. The media management services Wave digital experience allows clients to more easily compare providers or an individual provider’s scorecard to tailor the media management Wave findings into a custom shortlist of media agencies based on specific priorities.

Forrester clients can access The Forrester Wave™: Media Management Services, Q4 2024 report. If you would like to further discuss implications, please schedule a guidance session with me. Be on the lookout for my upcoming Forrester Wave evaluating marketing creative and content services in Q1 2025.