INTRODUCTION
As we enter a revolutionary time in advertising, full-service media agencies are presented with not only challenges but also remarkable opportunities for growth and innovation. With over 23 years of experience in this industry, we've seen firsthand the effects of a saturated marketplace, rapid technological advancements—especially AI—and evolving consumer expectations. Looking ahead to 2025, it's important that agencies embrace these changes to build upon the invaluable solutions they provide to marketers.
To thrive, agencies should consider strategic partnerships that enhance their capabilities and optimize resources. Collaborating with the right partners allows for tailored solutions that meet unique client needs. Embracing a technology-first mindset is vital and enables agencies to leverage data-driven insights for real-time optimizations and effective budget allocations.
The future of advertising belongs to those who adapt, collaborate, and innovate. This guide will equip you with actionable strategies to tackle today's most pressing challenges while finding opportunities for sustainable growth. Together, let's embrace the evolving landscape with confidence, ensuring we deliver exceptional value to marketers in a rapidly changing environment. The potential for success is vast, and by leveraging our collective strengths, we can redefine what's possible in advertising.
THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
In today's dynamic advertising landscape, full-service agencies are positioned at the forefront of innovation and transformation. The industry presents exciting challenges that spark creativity and drive strategic evolution, such as an increasingly saturated and competitive industry, consolidation, the rapid change in technology—including the boom of AI—evolving consumer behavior, and limited resources and bandwidth. Through partnering with agencies over the past 23+ years, we have identified three main areas where our agency partners often encounter obstacles, but have room to win. These include maximizing impact with focused resources, leveraging technology for innovation, and tying investment to outcomes.
Let's break down these challenges and the opportunities in more detail and explore effective solutions for driving growth.
As the digital advertising landscape rapidly evolves, full-service agencies are pioneering innovative approaches to maximize team capabilities and efficiency. They have to account for not only operational costs but also onboarding and technology fees, which are both timely and expensive. This makes it challenging to provide the specialized, data-driven support clients increasingly expect, all while scaling their own operations. By strategically allocating resources and embracing smart technologies, small teams are turning limited bandwidth into a catalyst for creative problem-solving and client-centric solutions.
Imagine a full-service agency with a small team handling multiple clients. Each client needs customized insights, data integrations, and campaign adjustments. But with limited hands on deck, delivering high-touch, personalized service isn’t easy. However, with limited hands on deck, delivering high-touch, personalized service isn't easy and can impact both client satisfaction and ROI.
With the technology boom, agencies are presented with an exhilarating opportunity to become true innovative leaders. To remain competitive, this challenge requires agencies to onboard new technologies, nurture human expertise, and develop a broader understanding of the complex ecosystem. Keeping up with the pace often feels like a race, especially when clients expect access to cutting-edge solutions that provide new opportunities to drive outcomes. By proactively investing in cutting-edge tools, solutions, and developing human expertise—while constantly investing time and resources into staying up-to-date with the latest tools, platforms, and partnerships—agencies are becoming future-proofed.
Consider an agency that recently invested in a new programmatic platform. The team needs time to onboard and master the platform's features to maximize clients' ROI. Meanwhile, clients expect immediate results, creating a cycle of pressure in which the agency is expected to perform before fully adapting to the new technology.
Agencies are elevating campaign measurement to an art form. By investing in sophisticated data infrastructure and real-time measurement tools, they’re creating unprecedented transparency. Achieving this level of precision is increasingly complex. It takes time and money to onboard the right data, tools, and get real-time measurement in place. This can impact their ability to make swift, data-driven decisions to improve campaign effectiveness and meet KPIs like ROAS, CPA, CPC, and CAC. This commitment enables agencies to deliver precise, outcome-focused strategies that directly drive business performance.
An agency working with a direct-to-consumer brand may need to attribute conversions across multiple touchpoints, including CTV, social media, and paid search. Without real-time data, they're limited in their ability to pivot budgets or adjust creatives mid-campaign, resulting in missed opportunities for optimization and decreased ROI.
These challenges are not obstacles but springboards for agencies to redefine their value, showcase their adaptability, and deliver extraordinary results in an ever-evolving industry. With a focus on strategic partnerships, embracing a technology-first approach, and prioritizing data-driven decisions, agencies can transform these challenges into growth opportunities, setting themselves up for success in 2025 and beyond.
SOLUTIONS
As agencies nurture and build their talent to meet the growing demands of clients, a strategic partner is key for future success. Working with a partner can not only help agencies extend their teams but also identify opportunities, refine media investments, and adjust strategy in real time for maximum ROI. And it's not a one-size-fits-all mentality when it comes to solutions. With customized and well-crafted strategies, the right partner can truly understand the challenges and offer access to resources such as advanced analytics, reporting platforms, and already-built technology that can relieve bandwidth and resource challenges.
Actionable Steps toward a Solution
CASE STUDY
Through Digital Remedy's Creative Suite, Marketwake was able to showcase the MACHETE product assortment and boost (ROAS). By deploying the Product Tiles rich media unit, which demonstrated winning products and encouraged audience engagement, the handcrafted accessories brand was able to effectively increase product awareness and drive interested shoppers to its site to purchase.
By implementing interactive rich media units featuring multiple products within a single ad, and continuously optimizing based on performance data insights, the team ensured the ads effectively targeted custom audience segments interested in fashion and style, maximizing engagement and driving conversions.
Real time revenue optimizations analyzed through onsite tracking code. Due to the success we're testing the creative unit against new audience targeting.
Increase in ROAS MoM
After partnering with many of the top media agencies, we’ve learned that welcoming a technology-first approach is essential for success. After winning business, agencies should partner with leading organizations that understand the importance of a holistic, data-driven, and analytical approach that solves for client challenges.
To better showcase the effectiveness of a technology-driven approach, let's dive into an example of how our partnership with a leading agency enabled them to measure upper-funnel tactics that were tied back to true business outcomes. A cohesive partnership allowed the agency to operate as if it had added an expert extension to its team. The agency was able to access real-time, cross-channel campaign insights through automated reporting in a platform.
This technological advantage enabled them to implement advanced optimization strategies and make data-driven decisions about budget allocation. The partnership went beyond simply providing tools; it offered a holistic solution that aligned media strategies with their client Industrious' broader business objectives, demonstrating the power of technology in delivering true business outcomes rather than just delivery.
Actionable Steps Toward a Solution:
CASE STUDY
Through Digital Remedy, Arm Candy was able to access automated reporting of real-time, cross-channel campaign insights, providing effective optimization and budget allocation strategies. The halo effect incrementality analysis, which analyzes the effect all media channels have on conversions, was able to demonstrate the business impact that CTV has on Industrious' search and social campaigns.
Going beyond standard performance analysis, Digital Remedy conducted an incrementality lift analysis which measured the lift in leads that would not have occurred without certain marketing efforts above native demand.
Partnership has expanded to help grow Arm Candy's other client's success.
Exceeded the CPA goal by
Agencies face mounting pressure to optimize campaigns toward tangible and, more importantly, measurable outcomes. That can be difficult when scaling and attaining new technology is so costly. One way that agencies start to embrace these opportunities is by working with a partner that addresses the industry-wide need for full transparency and accountability in advertising spend, ensuring that every dollar is tied to measurable outcomes. This strategy also includes working with a partner that has the technological infrastructure to move beyond branding metrics and focus on true business outcomes such as leads, site visits, and ROAS.
Actionable Steps Toward a Solution
The success of the example below highlights the critical importance of expert-led optimization and comprehensive performance measurement. It is vital to work with a partner that can help you answer questions such as:
CASE STUDY
The firm launched two initial OTT campaigns targeting adults 25-54 years old across key DMAs. Leveraging our performance CTV platform, the Digital Remedy team provided insights and made strategic, real-time optimizations against the firm’s KPIs based on conversion data (homepage visits and leads generated) which were gathered as the campaigns ran.
Utilizing the attribution insights delivered through the Performance CTV solution, Digital Remedy was able to identify and shift the firm’s budget towards the highest-performing variables, including dayparts, creatives, audiences, devices, and publishers, to maximize campaign performance.
New Incremental Leads
Total Homepage Visits
The Role of Strategic Partnerships
As full-service agencies navigate the evolving digital landscape of 2025, success will increasingly depend on forging strategic partnerships that tackle core challenges, such as limited bandwidth and the need for measurable outcomes. A proactive media partner understands that one-size-fits-all solutions no longer suffice; instead, agencies need tech-enabled, holistic strategies that can adapt to rapid industry changes.
By collaborating with the right partners, agencies can extend their services and deliver tailored solutions that enhance client value. Leveraging advanced analytics and real-time data empowers agencies to make informed decisions, driving campaign effectiveness. The digital ad market is projected to exceed $500 billion by 2025 (source: Statista), emphasizing the urgency for agencies to position themselves strategically.
As we step into 2025 and beyond, let’s approach this transformative journey with optimism and strategic vision, positioning ourselves to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape. The future of advertising shines brightly for those prepared to innovate, adapt, and take the lead.
Partnering with Digital Remedy
In today’s rapidly evolving advertising landscape, full-service agencies have an immense opportunity to future-proof for 2025 and beyond. At Digital Remedy, we understand these learning curves and are dedicated to being the strategic partner that agencies need to thrive in this environment.
With over 23 years of industry experience, we offer tailored solutions that address full-service agencies' unique challenges. Our technology-first approach to media management provides access to real-time insights through our Advanced Performance Dashboard, empowering agencies to optimize and drive the maximum ROI for every advertiser dollar spent. Using our digital advertising technology, like advanced audience targeting and creative optimization algorithms, agencies can enhance their creative strategies and improve core performance metrics, gaining a competitive edge in a saturated market.
Collaboration is at the heart of our approach. Our team acts as an extension of yours, offering hands-on support and strategic expertise when necessary to navigate the complexities of digital advertising. Whether it's conducting Incremental Lift Analysis to measure campaign effectiveness, refining media investments for greater efficiency, or implementing cross-channel strategies that connect the dots across every touchpoint, we’re here to drive your agency’s success.
Choosing Digital Remedy means choosing a partner committed to your growth. Together, we can turn challenges into opportunities, ensuring you not only meet but exceed your clients’ expectations. Let’s redefine what’s possible in advertising—partner with us and elevate your agency to new heights.
Get in touch, and let’s explore how we can deliver more for your clients.
