In autumn 2024, Dagmar surveyed advertisers’ expectations of their agency partners. The study focused especially on the challenges experienced in marketing and how agencies could best support the work of advertisers in their organizations.

30 marketing decision-makers participated in the study. The respondents’ marketing budgets varied from less than EUR 100,000 to more than EUR 10 million, and the respondents’ organizations had an average of 6 marketing agency partners. Typically, the marketing partner menu includes an advertising agency, media agency, research agency, communications agency and production agency.

The key challenge of marketing management: do we do impactful marketing?

According to the study, the most challenging part of working as a marketing decision-maker is verifying the effectiveness of marketing, which as many as 42% of the respondents mentioned as very challenging. 38% found it very challenging to manage marketing with knowledge in general. The utilization of artificial intelligence and the flow of information between marketing partners were also considered challenging.

Marketing processes do not yet support marketing management in the best way.

42% of marketing decision-makers felt that the marketing process was not effective enough. The areas identified for efficiency improvement were combining fragmented operations into more effective entities, overlapping roles between offices and in-house teams, lameness of indicators, lack of resources and planning, and overloading the marketing team with short-term operations instead of long-term strategic work.

The majority of advertisers (58%) prefer to concentrate agency partnerships on one or a few agencies. Smoothness of everyday life, agile communication and planning, time savings and committed and fruitful cooperation with the partner are sought from this. As a result of closer cooperation, it was felt that knowledge and competence were accumulated on both sides.

The use of specialised agencies, on the other hand, is preferred by advertisers who want certain specialists in their team or want to avoid subcontracting structures. The use of multiple offices was also advocated by minimizing risks and the diverse needs of a large organization.

A good office partner makes everyday life smooth and boosts the expertise of the client organization

The marketing partner’s ability to utilize artificial intelligence is considered important: 64% of the respondents considered it very important and 24% considered it quite important. AI is expected to bring primarily smarter and more impactful marketing solutions to the table, but also save time and reduce operational labor costs. It is also hoped that an up-to-date partner will help customer organizations learn how to utilize AI.

The development wishes for partner agencies emphasize the need to stay on top of the times and share this expertise with customers. In addition to proactivity, partner agencies are also expected to be transparent, committed, offer clear offers, an agile production process, have an international approach and internalize customer needs and situations. Respondents called for courage in the proposed solutions.

The respondents highlighted the following as the most important qualities of a good office partner:

1. Good people who are nice to work with (32%)

2. Smooth and reliable everyday life (48%)

3. Good value for money (44%)

4. Ability to utilise data and build solutions based on it (36%)

5. Diverse expertise and vision of marketing (32%)

Will offices continue to be needed?

The lack of resources in in-house marketing teams was repeatedly mentioned as a challenge, and the need for external partner support in marketing was seen as strong also in the future.

More than half of the respondents said that they would continue to need a partner for research data production, media planning and creative design of advertising, content production, online service development and brand development. More than a third of the respondents also need a partner for utilising marketing technologies, operating digital advertising, developing customer experience and analysing data. Product development, data management and marketing development projects were seen more as in-house functions.

The study was conducted as an open online survey on LinkedIn 9-10/2024.