With the launch of Agency by Agency, our first Agency Industry Report and our Data Shots into 28 subsectors, we are helping agencies, advisors, investors, suppliers and policy-makers get the data and insight they need to make informed decisions. We hope you’ll join us on this journey with our special launch offer.
After ten months of development, support from Innovate UK and working closely with our friends at The Data City, we’re excited to be launching our first analysis of the UK’s marketing, advertising, creative and media agency sector. It has been an intense and challenging road to get here, and one driven by our ambition to provide clarity and insight into our sector… something that has, until now, been notoriously difficult to map at scale.
Any successful journey begins with a map
With our launch we make public our first findings and make available for our subscribers the full Agency by Agency Industry Report and 28 Data Shots into industry subsectors, from Amazon/Marketplace to Website and UX/UI design. In the coming weeks and months we will be publishing more articles, reports and Data Shots, some of which we will outline in our roadmap below. But how did we get here?
Over the past ten months we have worked closely with The Data City to develop a new way of identifying, categorising and analysing the sector, mapping over 30,000 individual agencies. This is a level of precision and coverage that simply didn’t exist before and it is only the beginning. This mapping of the agency sector is the foundation of what is to come and a platform that will evolve with every insight, every new dataset, every input we get from our community and every challenge we help agencies tackle.
The early bird gets the launch code
Alongside all the excitement of bringing Agency by Agency to launch, we also know that we are all taking a leap into something new. We have been overwhelmed by the interest and support that we have received over the past few months since Agency by Agency was first announced, and as a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has travelled with us this far, we’re offering an early adopters annual subscription of £1,600 excl. VAT.
Signing up now not only gives you the first access to our Industry Report and Data Shots, but also the opportunity to shape what comes next. We have worked from the outset on the idea that we are ‘from the sector, for the sector’ and we are determined that our community will directly influence where this journey leads, from the data points we refine to the new features we develop. This is an open invitation to be part of something transformative; to help us shape the future of data-driven decision-making in the agency world.
The long and winding roadmap
Of course, we have our plans, and as early subscribers you are going to want to know what is coming down the road. First up, our Data Shots: on launch we offer benchmarking data and subsector analysis for different types of agencies based on the services offered:
- Amazon/Marketplace
- Behavioural research and behaviour change
- Brand strategy
- Content
- Conversion
- Copywriting
- Creative and advertising
- Customer experience (CX)
- Data and marketing analytics
- Design and branding
- Digital
- Digital product design
- Digital transformation
- Direct marketing
- E-commerce
- Experiential and events
- Influencer
- Integrated and full service
- Internal comms and employee engagement
- Market research
- Media
- PR and communications
- Search and performance
- SEO
- Social media
- Translation and localisation
- Video and production
- Website and UX/UI design
Within the Data Shots subscribers will be able to explore key stats, financials, growth metrics, subsector analysis and investment funding – you can find out in more detail what our Data Shots include here.
The Data Shots will be refined and updated throughout the year, with a publication schedule of March, June, September and December. Over the course of 2025 we will be adding new data points and talking with subscribers about what trends and insights are most important to them.
Niche is the word
One development that we have been working on intensively alongside the launch of the platform is the mapping of new segmentations, uncovering more agencies in emerging niches and building powerful models that go beyond simple description – models that can reveal the underlying predictors of agency performance. We’ll explore how internal factors like specialisms and team structures intersect with external forces such as consumer confidence and broader economic shifts.
Over time, we’ll introduce even more ways to explore our selector, to forecast using the tools that we now have to hand, and to test ideas through our data. We’ll be putting real power into the hands of those who make the decisions based on information that has not been available until now.
The data is in the detail – our comprehensive reports
With our launch we have published our first Agency by Agency Industry Report, exploring some of the main trends we have observed as we have mapped the sector for the first time and commentary from industry experts to provide additional insight. We approached this first report with the aim of answering some of the big questions: Where is growth and productivity in the UK agency sector? Where is investment flowing? What type of agency services are in demand? Which cities and regions are on the move?
As with everything we do, our first Industry Report is just the beginning. In the coming weeks we will be publishing our Agency by Agency Growth Report, digging deeper into the numbers to explore growth trends across the sector and the services that are most in demand. We will also be publishing a report on agencies and Innovate UK funding, providing an overview of not only where Innovate UK grants have been landing, but how Innovate UK funding can support innovation and creativity across the sector.
The stories of the sector
As we look ahead to 2025 and beyond, some of the stories we are already starting to investigate are the scalability of agencies, agencies as a force for good, the future of agency recruitment, women in the agency sector and what the data tells us about the new generation of agencies founded in the past five years. We are also working together with partners on co-sponsored reports, combining our data and insight with industry expertise and analysis. If this sounds like something you would like to get involved in, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
We hope all of this will have convinced you to sign up with our early adopter launch offer and gain full access to the Agency by Agency platform. We are really excited about the stories we will be telling in 2025 about the agency sector and we can’t wait to see where this takes us. We’re looking forward to building the future of agency intelligence with you.