They identified which regions are driving business revenue, told us about the growing number of innovation labs, and gave frank self-assessments of their digital savvy, along with a host of other surprising and not-so-surprising news.
One of the interesting trends investigated by the report is the development of the agency model.
The 2013 survey saw a large increase in the number of respondents from traditional advertising or marketing agencies that had both traditional and digital capabilities. In fact, agency-side respondents were almost evenly split between digital agencies (44%) and traditional shops with digital capabilities (45%).
While the two sets of respondents agreed in many areas, their answers did diverge in a few key topics.
For example, full-service agencies were decidedly less optimistic about the future of independent agencies than their digital-only counterparts.
When asked for their opinion on the negative statement, “Independent agencies do not have a bright future,” only 6% of digital agency respondents agreed compared to a quarter (26%) of full-service agencies.
Similarly, different types of agencies gave almost polar opposite responses when asked for their opinion on the statement: “The best route to growth is specialization.”
A majority of digital agency respondents (56%) agreed that specialization offers the best path to growth as opposed to 32% of respondents from full-service agencies.
While not unexpected that a majority of full-service agencies would disagree with such a statement, it was somewhat surprising that so many actually agreed.
In other words, almost one third of respondents from full-service agencies said they thought the best route to growth is through specialization, suggesting they are not particularly bullish on their own business model.
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