A year in review for media agencies… without the rankings and self-deception
I don’t know which media agencies had a good year.
Every December, the industry demands a league table: who won, who lost, who’s up, who’s doomed. And every December, trade journalism obliges with a familiar bundle of proxies—account wins, awards hauls, senior hires, office openings—stitched together into something that looks like evaluation. It isn’t.
To genuinely assess agency performance would require months of access: commercial terms, client churn, margin pressure, internal morale, delivery quality, and whether any of the strategy decks actually changed a client’s trajectory. That’s the work of a consultancy, not a newsroom.
Having worn both hats this year, I’ve seen this up close: what you see in press releases and interviews can differ starkly from what really goes on in an agency. Pretending otherwise doesn’t elevate journalism; it creates unrealistic expectations and, eventually, resentment when the truth fails to match the headlines.
So instead of crowning winners, this is a different kind of year-in-review. Not who “did well”, but what 2025 actually revealed about media agencies and why the usual scorecards are lying to us.
