Media agencies play a fundamental role in helping marketers navigate an ever-evolving landscape. Whether it’s consumer behavior, media consumption, channel proliferation, the regulatory environment, or new technology, it’s their job to stay on top of it while optimizing for your business outcomes.
But what does a “good” media agency look like? How can you spot a standout agency partner?
At Google Media Lab — made up of dozens of folks who plan, buy, run, and assess media on behalf of Google’s brands — we get asked this question a lot. A standout agency should be able to talk you through all the complexities and unknowns, and have a track record that gives you confidence it can navigate them. What does this mean in practice?
Based on our collective experience, we’ve identified five critical areas where, for Google, having a strong agency is essential. With these areas in mind, we’ve posed five key questions to ask an agency, along with guidance on what “good” looks like. What follows isn’t intended to be exhaustive or to guarantee success. Instead, think of it as a way to approach factors that, over time, we’ve found imperative to address.
How do data and measurement guide your decision-making?
Powerful marketing is built on good data. Your agency should have a strong point of view on data strategy, and the capabilities to help your organization build a foundational “data spine” that reflects your business’ unique needs.
Consider the following: How is your agency advising you on your data strategy and the infrastructure needed to power decisions? Before you spend $1, can it help you predict the probability of success? What systems and signals can your agency deploy in-flight to optimize campaigns in real time? And more tactically, what portion of the team is made up of data scientists and analytics specialists, as opposed to client-service generalists?
The right answers to these questions will be different for every business, but a strong agency partner can articulate a vision for how to achieve your business’ needs, and has a proven record of doing this for other clients.
Your agency should offer a measurement approach that’s rooted in incrementality across channels.
Here’s what strong, data-based decision-making looks like for us. Relying on the expertise of our retained agency team — 15% of whom are data scientists — we built an approach to drive performance pre-, during, and post-campaign. Pre-campaign — in a phase we call “win before you spend” — we use predictive analytics based on metrics like frequency, viewability, attention, creative quality, and campaign objective. At campaign kickoff, our approach shifts to “win while you spend,” which includes a testing structure and toolkit for optimizing in-flight. And post-campaign, we switch into “smart future” mode, conducting a deeper analysis to derive new insights.
Data and data strategy, of course, also play an integral role in measuring your marketing — and helping you justify and optimize investment. A great media agency partner will proactively work to prove marketing’s value as a revenue driver, and apply real science to connect your strategy to business outcomes.
What does that look like in practice? Your agency should be able to offer a measurement approach that’s rooted in incrementality across channels and the marketing funnel. It should drive connection and alignment between your marketing and finance teams.
Along these lines, our agency has helped us establish a multilevel measurement framework that leverages micro metrics (real-time signals) and macro metrics (advanced modeling) to better see the big picture. With its guidance, we’ve also enabled outcomes-based planning that directly connects marketing decisions to business outcomes.
What do you know about my audience and how does it inform your strategy?
Agencies that work with large, global brands need to stay tuned into a broad range of insights. They also need the right content and activation capabilities to bring culturally relevant ideas to life in-market.
Can your agency demonstrate a track record of using audience insights to build effective communication strategies? Does it have the capabilities to bring these ideas to life, both globally and in your key markets? What talent and ways of working does it bring to the table to enable this?
Like data-driven decision-making, this requires specific skill sets in communication strategy and planning, along with activation, innovation, and partnership development. As with data scientist resources, we are increasing the proportion of our retained agency team with this expertise. And with the agency’s help, we’re building up these capabilities in local markets, which we feel is needed to ensure both the quality and cultural relevance of the work.
What does privacy-forward mean to you?
Privacy is top of mind for us all these days. Your agency should play a key role in helping you manage this complex and evolving area, so it’s important to examine how it’s preparing your business for privacy changes and helping you drive performance. A strong agency partner will work hand in hand with you to build a privacy-first marketing strategy and give full transparency into its own data practices.
A strong agency partner will work hand in hand with you to build a privacy-first marketing strategy and give full transparency into its own data practices.
Our agency, for example, has helped us establish a plan centered around a “Build, Measure, Activate” framework that solidifies our first-party data foundations, derives insights from that data, and activates it by delivering relevant messages to the right people. It also led the creation of clear guidelines for data usage between itself and its clients to ensure we use data in a privacy-centric way.
How do you manage creative complexity?
Shifts in media consumption, new privacy regulations, and various other factors are making the way we go to market increasingly complex. The TV-centric campaigns of the past required just a few assets, but digital-led strategies can require hundreds of bespoke assets across different platforms and formats.
As a result, it’s crucial to know how your agency plans to support and empower your team in managing it all. What tools, technology, and ways of working will it bring to deliver effective campaigns efficiently? How is it already doing this successfully for other clients?
A strong agency will proactively address complexity. From a performance marketing perspective, it will fully embrace AI-powered ad formats that leverage creative elements to dynamically build ads that will deliver performance.
Here’s another practical example. We’ve partnered with our agency to build new creative solutions that help us meet the changing needs of our campaigns. A digital creative SWAT team builds for specific platforms, like YouTube and social. We’re also experimenting with new AI capabilities, like more rapid testing of creative assets powered by AI. In fact, the majority of our digital performance ads are now machine generated.
What are your short- and long-term plans for AI?
While we’re still in the early days of AI, the opportunity it presents to power our work is enormous. Already, we can see clear applications across nearly every stage of the marketing process — whether it’s strategy and insights, creative inspiration, production, audience targeting, optimization, reporting and analysis, planning, or beyond.
With AI, the agency of the future will need to evolve beyond what it looks like today.
Is your agency embracing the opportunity? Can it articulate how AI is changing its business today, and how it will change it tomorrow? Does it have a clear framework for evaluating and testing AI tools and partners? Is it technically capable of building for gaps in the marketplace?
Our entire industry is just beginning to tackle these big questions, but one thing we know for sure is that with AI, the agency of the future will need to evolve beyond what it looks like today. A great agency can be a thought leader and strategic partner to you and your organization as you navigate what’s ahead together.
While answers to the questions above will vary, and the exact formula for success will be slightly different for every business, your organization deserves a standout partner. I hope this list can be a thought-starter for the plans you make with your agency partners.
