Mapping the UK agency landscape

Opinion

The UK is world-class at agencies. So why have we known so little about them? Tom Salmon shares the findings from the Atlas 2026 report.

The UK’s agency sector is globally competitive yet systematically under‑measured – and that blind spot is distorting where capital, talent and policy attention flow.

The UK is genuinely world-class at agencies. In creative thinking, strategic planning, the craft of building brands, and the science of reaching audiences, the UK agency sector has long competed at the highest level on the global stage. That’s reflected in decades of investment from multinational holding companies, our persistent ability to attract and export talent and the UK Government’s decision to name marketing and advertising as a high‑potential growth sector in its Industrial Strategy.

And yet, until very recently, we have been steering this world‑class sector with an alarmingly blurry map. We have lacked even the basics: how many agencies there are, what they actually do, where they are based, how fast they are growing, and where capital is (and is not) flowing.

Our recent mapping, published in The Agency by Agency Atlas 2026, identifies nearly 25,000 active agencies employing 194,000 people, generating £33bn in turnover and £18bn in GVA across 29 distinct specialisms.

This is not a niche industry, yet for years investors, policymakers and agency leaders have been making decisions with almost no shared picture of its basic contours.

The information gap plays out in different ways

For investors and those active in mergers and acquisitions, the absence of reliable sector intelligence is expensive, making it harder to identify opportunities and evaluate targets. This may help explain why most investment flows to certain corners of the sector, whether based on geography or specialism, and why high‑growth niches within the sector are seeing very little investment at all.

London and the South East account for 90% of all investment funding, while cities such as Sheffield, Leicester and Newcastle-upon-Tyne receive nearly nothing at all, despite their agencies showing average growth rates significantly higher than those in the capital.

For policymakers, the gap risks mistargeting support. The Industrial Strategy has ambitious plans for regional cluster development, inclusive growth and innovation support. But how will this be directed without a clear idea of what the sector actually looks like – from where growth is happening to which specialisms are expanding the fastest, where investment is lacking despite strong performance, and where existing support mechanisms are failing to reach the agency businesses that could most benefit from them?

For agencies, it obscures potential strategic direction and opportunity. Agencies trying to understand how they are performing relative to their peers, where opportunities might lie in adjacent specialisms, or what their regional market looks like have historically had very little reliable data to work with.

This lack of definition also holds the sector back by making it harder for clients to navigate specialist capabilities and for the right agencies to be discovered.

Conversations fuelled by mapping

Comprehensive mapping of the sector, and the results of that mapping now available to us via The Agency by Agency Atlas, along with how we will interrogate our dataset in the future, make different conversations possible.

We know that the specialisms with the highest average agency growth (Influencer, Amazon and Marketplace, Data and Analytics, Social Purpose and Sustainability, and Digital and AI Transformation) account for a tiny fraction of active agencies. It is a signal about where client spend is moving, where new agency formation might be targeted, and where investment and innovation support might be best targeted.

When you can show that the South West leads the entire country on GVA per head despite London generating nearly two thirds of total sector turnover, or that Oxford leads all fifteen major city clusters on productivity while growing at less than a fifth of Manchester’s rate, you begin to build a picture of a sector that is far more complex, more regionally varied, and more interesting than the headline figures alone suggest.

The UK has long been world-class at agencies. If we want it to stay that way – to move investment and innovation funding to where it can make the most difference, and to renew the sector for the next wave of client challenges – we have to match that creative and commercial strength with an equally world‑class understanding of the sector itself.

For investors, policymakers, agencies and clients, that starts with treating data about agencyland not as a curiosity, but as core infrastructure for decisions.

The Agency by Agency Atlas is available to read for free at https://agencybyagency.com/atlas/