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 launch checklist: before, during and after, across every discipline
The checks that keep a launch from failing at the joins: objectives and briefs, claims and codes, consent and accessibility, product and service readiness before launch; synchronised go-live and monitoring during it; and a measured review after it.
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 campaign calendar: phases, key dates and the flighting of every discipline
One timeline that shows every discipline phase by phase: when each is off, light or heavy, the phases of the campaign, the fixed dates it must respect and the dependencies between teams. With the scheduling patterns of media planning: continuity, flighting and pulsing.
The objective-and-task budget calculator: cost what the objectives need
Build the communication budget up from the objectives: list the tasks each objective needs, cost each one, add a contingency, and see the total. The objective-and-task method taught in Kotler and Keller, with the checks the budgeting research recommends.The PESO channel audit: paid, earned, shared and owned on one grid
A worksheet that lists every channel the brand uses under paid, earned, shared and owned media, with the job each does, its budget or effort, its owner and its KPI, so gaps, overlaps and over-reliance show at a glance. After Gini Dietrich's PESO model.The customer journey map: stages, touchpoints, needs, feelings and owners
A canvas that lays one customer's journey along a line, from discovering a need to recommending the brand, and fills in what happens at each stage: the touchpoints, the need, the feeling, the message and the team that owns it. After McKinsey's consumer decision journey and the touchpoint research behind it.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.The creative brief template: one problem, one insight, one proposition
The page a planner hands to a creative team: the problem the work must solve, the audience and the insight, the single proposition and its proof, the tone, and what the work should make people think, feel and do. From the account-planning tradition and the industry's briefing guides.The STP worksheet: segment the market, choose the target, set the position
A worksheet for the oldest sequence in marketing strategy: describe the segments on the bases that predict behaviour, score them, choose a targeting strategy and write the position. From Wendell Smith's 1956 paper to Kotler's textbooks.The IMC plan canvas: the whole integrated plan on one page
Eight boxes, filled in order, that turn a business problem into one integrated plan: situation, objectives, audience, message, mix, timing, budget and measurement. Built on PR Smith's SOSTAC and the marketing plan outline in Kotler and Keller.Marketing mix modelling: how it is built, how to trust it, and when it fits
A marketing mix model estimates what each activity added to sales from aggregate data over time, and what a different budget would do. This piece sets out how one is built and validated, where the open-source tools stand in 2026, and when a model is worth commissioning.Campaign planning and calendars: from plan to schedule
How to turn an integrated plan into a schedule: continuous, flighted and pulsed patterns, what the effective-frequency and recency research says about timing, one calendar for always-on activity, bursts, launches, PR moments and events, and the lead times each discipline needs.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.Writing a marketing plan a board will approve
The structure of a marketing and communications plan that holds up in the boardroom: Kotler and Keller's outline, a situation analysis that ends in a diagnosis, an objectives tree from business to communications, strategy and the integrated mix, budget, timeline, measurement and risks, how SOSTAC maps onto it, and the one-page version.Which mix for which objective: sixteen objectives and the disciplines that serve them
A practical chooser for the sixteen objectives marketers plan for: which disciplines usually lead, which support and what to measure, with the balance between brand and activation, the caveats that change the answer, and links to every primer and objective hub.Marketing strategy and growth: the frameworks to use with the board, and what they change in the brief
Ansoff's growth matrix, Porter's generic strategies, the BCG growth-share matrix, jobs to be done and Kotler's Marketing 5.0 each answer a different board question. What each one says, where it falls short, and how the choice changes the communications brief.The marketing mix: why price, product and place also communicate
Borden's mixer of ingredients, McCarthy's four Ps, Booms and Bitner's seven Ps for services and Lauterborn's four Cs, where communications sits in the mix, and a practical check that the other Ps say what the campaign says.Segmentation, targeting and positioning: choosing whom to serve
Where segmentation came from, how the STP process works step by step, how to evaluate segments and choose a targeting strategy, the evidence-based debate over targeting versus reach, and how a position becomes the message house.Planning frameworks: SOSTAC, RACE, the brief and the plan on a page
The planning models marketers use most (PR Smith's SOSTAC, Smart Insights' RACE, account planning), the documents that turn a plan into work (campaign brief, creative brief, media plan, the integrated plan on a page), and how to choose between them.Budgeting for IMC: setting the total and splitting it
How marketers set a communication budget (objective and task, percentage of sales, competitive parity, share of voice), what the evidence says about splitting it between brand and activation, and why the working versus non-working ratio is a poor guide.Touchpoints and the customer journey: from the funnel to the messy middle
Every contact with a brand is a message. How the consumer decision journey replaced the funnel, what Google's messy middle adds, how business buying groups decide, and how to map touchpoints to objectives.The IMC models: relationships, pillars, PESO and the stages of integration
Four models that shape how integration is planned: Duncan and Moriarty's relationship model, Kliatchko's four pillars, Gini Dietrich's PESO model and Schultz's stages. What each asks, how they differ, and when to reach for which.