The agency landscape 2026
Who the industry's published rankings recognise this year, globally and in five regions: how the six lists were made, how to use them to find a partner rather than a famous name, and what they cannot tell you.
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Understand integrated marketing, step by step
Plain-language foundations, primers and guides on integrated marketing communications, with a source for every claim. New here? Begin with the short reads below.
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The library
The crisis communication checklist: prepare, respond, recover
What to have ready before a crisis, what to do in the first hours, and how to recover and learn after it: the crisis team, stakeholder map, holding statements and approvals; verified facts, one voice and regular updates; and an after-action review. After CIPR, PRSA and UK Government Communication Service guidance, Coombs's situational crisis communication theory and ISO 22361.
The integration RACI: who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed
A matrix of the activities in an integrated programme against the people and agencies involved, marking for each who does the work, who signs it off, who is consulted and who is kept informed. A general project-management practice, defined in PMI's lexicon, applied to marketing teams and agencies.
The agency brief template: the client's business brief to every agency
The brief a client sends to its agencies and internal teams: where the business is now, where it needs to be, who it must reach, what the work must achieve, the budget, timing and rules, and how success will be measured. One brief for every discipline, after the industry's joint briefing guides.
Marketing operations and governance: running integrated marketing as a system
What marketing operations does (roles, process, technology and data), how brand governance works in practice (guidelines, asset management, approvals), a RACI and stage gates for integrated campaigns, legal and compliance review, a governance checklist, and how to stop process becoming the product.Working with agencies: pitches, pay, scopes and reviews
How to choose and manage agencies: whether to pitch at all, what a pitch costs, the industry's pitch principles (the Good Pitch, the Pitch Positive Pledge, the ANA and 4As), remuneration models and what the ANA found about them, scopes of work, lead-agency, roster and in-house choices, and two-way performance reviews.Briefing agencies: the most important document in marketing
Why the brief decides the quality of the work, what the BetterBriefs research and the industry's best-practice guides found, what a client brief contains and how it differs from the creative brief, how to run the briefing, the brief back and the debrief, and the failures to avoid.