Damien Quinn.
By Damien Quinn, Manager, Agency Sales (ANZ), Eyeota, a Dun & Bradstreet company
The data landscape is broad and complex, and have long relied on their agencies for insights and navigation. For decades, data sat alongside agency work as an input: useful, necessary, but rarely central to how agencies defined their value. That relationship is expanding.
In Australia, agencies are operating under a new set of pressures. Clients want more integration across media, creative, commerce, and customer experience. They want faster answers, sharper targeting, clearer measurement, and more flexibility. At the same time, they want all of it delivered more efficiently.
That squeeze is reshaping the agency proposition. Increasingly, the agencies best positioned to thrive will not just be those with strong strategic thinking or creative execution. They will be the ones that know how to operationalise data, connect it across environments, and use it to drive smarter planning and better outcomes.
More pressure, less margin for error
The backdrop matters. Marketing budgets remain under pressure. Teams are leaner. Clients are scrutinising every line item and expecting their teams to do more with less. Meanwhile, the fragmentation of channels, platforms, and identifiers continues to make planning and activation more complex.
Agencies are being leaned on to unlock greater value without clients needing to build in‑house capabilities or add to head count. There’s a lot for clients to balance these days—cost, speed, interoperability, talent availability, and long‑term flexibility—and agencies are becoming the critical interpreter in helping them navigate these decisions.
The agency scope itself is broadening. As creative, media, commerce, and customer functions converge, agencies are being asked to connect more dots than ever before. The brief is no longer simply to deliver impressions or build a campaign. It is to support business growth across a more complicated and more accountable customer journey.
That requires something sturdier than channel expertise alone. It requires a stronger data foundation.
Data is becoming part of the service itself
One of the clearest changes in the market is that brands and agencies are thinking differently about data ownership and control. Not long ago, much of the industry was content to access third-party data through platforms as needed. Today, more organisations want to license data, bring it into their own environments, and use it more strategically across planning, modelling, activation, and measurement. In supporting them, data companies play a role across the entire digital supply chain, creating a “domino learning effect” and encouraging collaborative partnerships.
AI is raising the stakes on data quality
AI is accelerating this trend. The industry has moved beyond the phase where simply mentioning AI was enough to sound innovative. Now the real question is much more practical: What improves performance?
In many cases, the answer is not more data. It is better data.
AI can help agencies work faster. It can support audience discovery, recommendations, modelling, and workflow efficiency. But the quality of those outputs still depends heavily on the quality of the inputs. If the underlying data is inconsistent, opaque, outdated, or poorly documented, AI will not solve that problem. It will simply scale the confusion.
That is why data quality is becoming a more strategic concern inside agencies. It is also why the right external partnerships matter more than ever. Agencies need data they can trust, data that is interoperable, and data providers that can clearly explain where signals come from and how they are derived.
The agencies that stand out will be the ones that make data usable
The future agency is not defined by having the most tools or the biggest stack. It is defined by making data more usable, more actionable, and more accountable for clients.
That means choosing quality over dataset size. It means building the right partnerships to enrich audience understanding and improve activation across channels. And it means helping clients navigate an environment where efficiency matters, but effectiveness still decides who wins.
Agencies in Australia are being squeezed from multiple directions, but pressure has a way of clarifying where real value lives. Right now, that value is moving closer to data.
Agencies are being leaned on to unlock value without clients needing to build big in‑house capabilities/huge head count. There’s a lot for clients to weigh up — cost, speed, interoperability, talent availability, and long‑term flexibility — and agencies are becoming the critical interpreter in helping them navigate these decisions.
Data companies play a role across the entire digital supply chain, creating a “domino learning effect” and encouraging collaborative partnerships.
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