For brands undertaking a media agency review, sometimes the hardest part about breaking up with an old agency is figuring out who gets the data. The value of data has become evident to brands and its role in media planning is increasingly vital—making it perhaps the most central question when handling media reviews. Before moving accounts to a new agency, brands need to get a grip on what data they own, how important it is to their media plans and how portable it is to their new agency, according to advertising leaders.

“The conversations today don’t start with media, they start with data,” said Marc Ducnuigeen, chief client officer at agency Goodway Group, referring to agency reviews. The industry has always been engaged in a game of musical chairs, where brands look for new media and creative agencies to handle their accounts, and data is now core to that move. Brands need a data strategy to inform their future marketing campaigns, especially in digital channels, such as within Google and Meta, where performance hinges on a grasp of historical rates and understanding specific audiences.

When a brand makes a switch to a new agency, it’s not always as simple as taking historical campaign data with them, especially if the brand hasn’t been managing the buying directly, say, through Google’s Display and Video 360 DSP or within The Trade Desk’s DSP, according to ad leaders. There also are inter-agency politics to navigate where a former agency isn’t always keen on handing over historical campaign data, which they sometimes consider proprietary. Meanwhile, brands are turning to their new agencies for help establishing their future first-party data strategies to turn their own information into lucrative assets. For all these reasons, the data questions are emerging earlier in the agency review process.

“It’s a data-driven world, and it’s changed the flavor of what we see in pitches and what we're hearing from clients,” Ducnuigeen said.

CTOs at the table

Over the past two years, as brands have been more cognizant of their data needs, their requests for proposals to new potential agencies emphasize the role of data in the decision-making, Ducnuigeen said. Also, in the agency reviews, more brands are bringing their chief technology officers into the rooms to make sure a new agency is a valuable data partner, Ducnuigeen said.

“I can think of a pitch two weeks ago, we had a CTO in there, and he might have asked some of the most direct questions, but actually, interestingly, very much leaning in,” Ducnuigeen said. “In the past, if I ever saw a CTO in a room, they were almost kind of like the cynic and the gatekeeper, saying you’re not touching our data. Now, companies and brands understand the value that they’re sitting on. And what they’re interested in is how they squeeze more value out of it. How they maybe even monetize it.”

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With brands and agencies aligning more closely on data operations, agencies can also act as consultants to brands that want to deploy their data in new ways, according to advertising leaders. With this new dynamic in the industry, agencies that prove their worth through data—uncovering new insights about customers and showing new ways to reach them—have a leg up against rival agencies. Indeed, Volkswagen’s competitive agency pitch, which ended with the car brand sticking with Omnicom agency PHD, was all about how the agency could help VW Group shape its data strategy going forward, and own more of its data, Ad Age reported in July.

In recent weeks, Kimberly-Clark, Mars, and Pacific Life Insurance joined the ranks of brands launching media reviews. In September, Amazon concluded a media review by splitting that business between major agency holding companies Omnicom and WPP. That review very much included negotiations over how the agencies could help Amazon expand its retail media business, Ad Age reported.

The rise of retail media is one of the reasons agencies have to prove they are adept at putting data to use, according to ad leaders. Retail media has become a lucrative avenue for big-box stores, such as Walmart and Target, as well as Amazon, to help consumer-package brands piggyback on the stores’ data to reach customers. Brands in financial services, travel, apparel, groceries, pharmacies and other categories are standing up data businesses to help fuel advertising. At the same time, brands that pay for retail media services need new mechanisms to measure those ad campaigns and justify their value.

“There’s an interest in using retail media data, connected to a brand’s first-party data to find clearer, better audiences to go out and serve,” Ducnuigeen said.

“In one review, we were looking at the brand’s first-party data, and it very clearly illustrated that the impact of those customers was exponential, you’re talking 70% to 80% greater impact in terms of the lifetime value that those customers represented,” Ducnuigeen said, although he could not reveal the name the brand publicly. “When we teased that out in a much more demonstrable way, you could see the light bulbs really going on.”

Also read: 8 of 2024’s best retail media strategies

Last year, Obele Brown-West Hinsley, president of Tracer, a data management platform, helped a global pizza chain conduct a media review (Hinsley said she was not allowed to identify the brand). Corralling the brand’s data assets from multiple sources was among the goals of the review, Hinsley said. The brand wanted to get ownership of all its data, because prior to the review all the data was sitting in disparate sources, coming from different restaurants and digital platforms, Hinsley said.

Data can be a reason a brand chooses a new agency, but it also can act as anchor for brands, keeping them tied to an agency. If the old agency has all the keys to the data then it’s harder to switch, according to Hinsley.  “Brands feel as if they’re a little bit more handcuffed to an agency,” Hinsley said. “When that happens, especially when it comes to data governance, it’s very hard to try to unwind some of the historical work that they’ve been doing with agencies, especially if it’s a long-standing relationship. So that is one of the biggest considerations when they’re planning for a review.”

One of the most important considerations for a brand when trying to get a grip on its media data is ensuring it has ownership over its accounts across platforms, such as Google and Meta, Hinsley said. Agencies sometimes act as the buyer for brands through their own accounts, meaning all the historical data that informed media campaigns exists within a vault owned by the agency. If the brand maintained control of their media buying accounts then it’s less complicated transferring that information; the brand can just give the new agency the log-in credentials, according to advertising experts.

“We were actually participating in an RFP this year” for another global brand, said Hinsley, who declined to name the brand. “One of the things that they required of us was to make sure that we were able to backfill about 20 years of historical data. So that was something that they were very concerned about. That if they made a transition away from the partners that they had been working with, they would lose that historical data from a media buying planning standpoint.” 

Pain point

Data transferring from an old agency to a new agency is typically drama-free, without arguments between the old agency and the new one. But it can be complicated, according to Tom Denford, CEO of media consulting firm ID Comms. “It is a kind of painful part of a pitch transition, if you’re changing agencies,” Denford said.

There are some simple ways to make the data switch easier, however. “We have very clear templates for agencies to be able to transfer all the different buying accounts, documents, the different data sources and data products that they're using,” Denford said. “So yes, it’s a complexity in a pitch, but it’s just another complexity that has to be managed.”

Still, agencies are protective of their data, too, and there are legitimate points of contention about who owns what data, according to one data executive at a firm within a major media holding company who spoke with Ad Age on condition of anonymity. Some agencies do get defensive about handing over data, especially if it’s based on, say, proprietary historic ad rates. In a case like that, the new agency wants years of media buying data and rates—known as CPMs or “cost per thousand impressions”—but those rates could be special to the former agency, and that data could partly contain information that is based on other brands’ historical buying information, too. The new agency, however, needs to know the rates if it is going to make good on lower CPMs it promised a brand to win its business, the data exec said.

“There’s a lot of intricacies to it,” the executive said. “Technically the clients own the data, but when they leave their agency, if they don’t own it, agencies don’t always hand it over.”

Before embarking on a review, brands need to understand the state of their media buying accounts and which entities control them, Hinsley said. “When I say the accounts, it’s the Google account. Is that through their own master account or was that through an agency's account, where the media buying and planning was occurring?” Hinsley said. “For Meta, was that through the brand’s account, or was that through a master account that the agency facilitated?”

Former agencies mostly cooperate with a brand when handing the keys to a new agency, but they don’t always make it a smooth transition, according to the data executive. Sometimes, the new agency has to go directly to Google, Meta or another entity to get access to historical account information, the executive said. “I can tell you for a fact, based on other transitions I’ve been a part of, clients can’t readily get that data from a lot of agencies,” the exec said, “and in a lot of cases, the old agency owns the accounts.”

Winning on insights

While account data is crucial to future media buying strategies, first-party data, which is information owned by the brands themselves, is often the most valuable, according to ad leaders. Brands are increasingly evaluating agencies based on whether they can unlock value from that data. Also agencies are evaluated based on what third-party data they bring to supercharge the media strategy. The agencies are being graded for how well they understand a brand’s customers, and how quickly they can turn data into action.

“If it’s brands that work with multiple global agencies, they’re definitely thinking about speed to insight and consolidation of insight,” ID Comms’ Denford said, “because they're getting insights from a number of different brands. And there are a number of different agencies they work with, in a number of different languages, for different buying platforms.”

Data also is a sensitive subject for brands dealing with regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which governs how brands collect data and with whom they can share it. U.S. regulators also are watching brands closely for data compliance, making the handling of data a fundamental aspect of agency reviews.

“We all know most brands are starting to use data as a foundation, or lynchpin, to make all kinds of scaled and timely decisions to ultimately drive connections and performance at any touch point,” said Anant Veeravalli, global head of analytics at IPG’s marketing intelligence firm Kinesso. “As brands start to think about the change of guard after a review, having clear boundaries, guardrails and protocols around how their data is managed today, and how it will be managed tomorrow, is key. Staying compliant in the way data is handled, managed and leveraged is going to be critical.”