The Advertising Business Is Growing. Is Your Agency?

I have some unusually good news for agency owners. The advertising business is growing. Really growing. Madison & Wall estimates that global advertising revenue increased 12.7% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, following 13.4% growth in the first quarter. It now forecasts 11% growth for the full year and a total revenue of $1.3 trillion.

After several years of hearing about economic uncertainty, shrinking retainers, procurement pressure, project work replacing AOR relationships, clients bringing capabilities in-house, and AI threatening to rewrite the agency business model, that is a pretty encouraging number. It also raises a question every agency owner should be asking right now: if the advertising business is growing this fast, is your agency getting its share?

Before anybody starts calculating an automatic 11% raise for every agency in America, there is an important distinction. Madison & Wall is measuring advertising revenue earned by sellers of advertising, not agency revenue. The advertising economy is tied to the broader economy, but it behaves differently, shaped by competitive intensity, a changing advertiser mix, AI investment, cross-border advertising, and other structural forces. So an 11% increase in advertising does not mean your agency should grow 11%.

What it does mean is that there is real growth in the market. What happens to your agency’s share of that growth is another matter entirely, and that may be the more important new-business question heading into 2027.

I have spent much of my career looking at agency wins from the marketer’s side of the table. Whenever I can find a CMO, CEO, or other marketing leader explaining why they selected a particular agency, I pay attention to the words they use. Business understanding comes up. Category expertise. Strategic thinking. Understanding of the customer. Collaboration. Partnership. Growth. What I don’t ever hear is a marketer say, “They had the prettiest credentials deck.”

That doesn’t mean pitches aren’t important. But it keeps reinforcing something I have come to believe about agency new business. There are really two competitions. The second is the one agencies obsess about: getting selected. You are in the review, you have the brief, you are preparing the pitch, there are four agencies in the room, and one of you is going to win.

The first competition is getting considered. How did the four other agencies get considered? Why were they invited instead of 40 other agencies capable of doing the work? Why did somebody at the client already know their names? Why did the marketer believe they deserved a conversation? That is where a lot of agency growth is won or lost…before the pitch.

A growing advertising market makes that first competition even more important. When markets contract, the natural instinct is defensive. Protect the clients you have. Cut expenses. Delay hiring. Squeeze a little more utilization out of the staff. Hope the economy improves.

A growing market presents a very different strategic question: how much of the new opportunity are you willing to go after?

Because additional marketing investment won’t arrive at every agency’s door in equal portions, some agencies will grow faster than the market. Some will maintain. Some will shrink while the overall advertising economy expands around them. That is why I do not think the lesson from these numbers is, “Good news, advertising is up.” The more useful lesson is that this may be an unusually good time to become more intentional about growth.

One way to think about that is to pick ten companies you would genuinely like to have as clients. Not 500 names sitting in a CRM. Ten. Then ask yourself a few simple questions about each one.

1. Do they know we exist? Not whether you have emailed them. Is there reasonable evidence the right people actually know your agency?
2. Do they understand why we are relevant to their business? Awareness is not enough. If your agency’s name came up tomorrow, would they understand why your experience, expertise, or point of view might matter?
3. Have we demonstrated that we understand something important about their category, customer, or business? There is a big difference between saying “we understand your business” and giving someone evidence that you do.
4. Have they experienced how we think? Through an article, research, a case study, LinkedIn, a conference, a conversation, a presentation, or something else that allows them to experience our intellectual product in action.
5. And finally, is there someone inside the organization who might actually put our name on the list? Is there an advocate who would say, “What about them?”

I call this the Agency Consideration Test. Score yourself zero, one, or two on each question. A total score of zero to three means you are largely relying on luck. Four to six means you have created some visibility but not enough relevance to make consideration likely. Seven or eight means you are building meaningful consideration. Nine or ten means there is a reasonable chance somebody remembers your agency when the need arises.

Do it for all ten prospects. The results may tell you considerably more about your future pipeline than the number of names currently sitting in it.

I have been talking for years about the reality that only a small percentage of your prospects are actively looking for an agency at any particular moment. That is what makes agency prospecting difficult. You can have the right company, the right CMO, and a perfectly relevant message, and they still do not need an agency, aren’t paying attention, and won’t even entertain the idea of changing agencies. Why would they bother to answer your outreach?

We tend to classify that as failure. Maybe we are measuring the wrong thing. The objective of prospecting is not always to get the meeting today. Sometimes the objective is to make your agency considerable tomorrow. You cannot force the other 97% to need you, but you can influence what they know about you before they do. They can learn your expertise, see your work, read your thinking, understand your positioning, hear about you from another marketer, watch you solve problems like theirs, or have a useful conversation with you when there is not an assignment attached to it.

Then something changes. The CMO changes. Growth stalls. A competitor starts winning. A new product launches. An acquisition happens. The incumbent relationship starts feeling stale. The business moves in a different direction. Suddenly yesterday’s 97% becomes today’s 3%. And at that point, the question is not whether you can get their attention. It is whether you have already earned enough of it to be considered.

I spend most of my time talking with agency owners about growth. Sometimes they call because something is clearly broken. The pipeline has slowed. Referrals are not enough. Positioning is not differentiating the agency. Prospecting is not creating conversations. Nobody internally has enough time to lead new business properly.

But fixing what’s broken isn’t the only reason to invest in business development. There is another reason, and in a market like this it may be the more exciting one: opportunity.

If the advertising business is expanding at an unusually rapid rate, this is not the year to be satisfied with maintaining what you have. It’s the year to ask where you could grow, which prospects should know you, what you want them to know you for, what evidence you are giving them, and whether you are building consideration before an opportunity comes up.

The most important question is the simplest. If one of your best prospects started an agency search tomorrow, would anybody there say your name?

Growth is happening. Whether your agency gets its share depends on you.

If you are starting to think about what you want your agency to look like in 2027, I would be happy to spend an hour reviewing your positioning, prospect universe, pipeline, and new-business process with you. Not because something is off. Maybe there is a way to scale what’s already successful. Find a time on my calendar: https://www.calendly.com/jheenan. Sign up for my New Business Newsletter. Please forward this post to anyone who might benefit. If you like this post, I’d appreciate a thumbs-up and a comment. Let’s also connect on LinkedIn.

#LetsGrow!