The Budget Line. Optimism is up. Investment isn't.
More than two-thirds of agencies expected this year to beat last year. Fewer than half expected to invest in it. What crosses that gap is not what saves time; it is what gets a firm found, and what proves it is worth the fee.
Ask a room of agency owners whether this year will beat last year and most hands go up. Ask what they are spending to make it happen and the room goes quiet.
That gap is measurable. RSW/US surveys marketing, advertising, digital, PR and consulting firms across the United States and Canada, drawn from a sample of more than 5,000, alongside a panel of senior marketers. Going into 2026, more firms expected their business to improve than two years earlier. Far fewer expected to put money behind it.
Marketing and professional services firms expecting their business to improve in 2026, against those expecting to invest somewhat or heavily in it, in people or technology. Heading into 2024, only 57 percent had expected improvement. Optimism went up; investment did not follow.
The clients were cooler still. Only 56 percent of client-side firms expected improvement, down from 78 and 79 percent in the two prior years, and 37 percent expected to invest. Just 25 percent expected their marketing spending to rise, against 57 percent a year earlier. Agencies are more confident than the people who pay them.
Almost every tool sold into this market promises the same thing: it will save hours. That may be true and still be useless against a bank account, because hours are not a line item. They turn into money by one of two routes, work you would otherwise have turned away or cost you would otherwise have carried, and a seller who cannot name which one is asking you to do the arithmetic yourself.
Agencies have lost the same argument from the other side for years. Strategy comes off the estimate not because clients think it worthless, but because it arrives with no budget attached. The test runs both ways in one sentence: name the budget this comes out of, and what stops being bought.
If most firms are not investing, what does the other half fund? The clearest answer in the data is being found, because the routes firms were found by are shrinking.
| Route | 2022 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Networking | 73% | 58% | −15 points |
| Past relationships | 67% | 48% | −19 points |
| Friends and co-workers | 60% | 35% | −25 points |
| Web search | 16% | 39% | +23 points |
Client-side responses, RSW/US 2026 New Year Outlook Report. Direct outreach held at 45 percent. Every warm route fell; the cold one more than doubled.
Behind visibility sits margin, bought indirectly. Nobody purchases margin; they purchase what stops it leaking, and the largest leak is value nobody has written down. The 4A's and the ANA reported in June 2024 that only 10 percent of agencies and 5 percent of clients have a formal definition of the value an agency delivers. Fees get negotiated over something neither side has defined, which is how a rate card becomes the only language in the room.
The same RSW/US report shows why that matters. Asked why they pass on a firm, marketers ranked weak strategic thinking second, behind lack of category experience and ahead of creative quality. Agencies report 60 percent of clients now have some in-house capability, up from 40 percent, and only 7 percent of clients say they prefer to buy productized offerings; 65 percent prefer services and capabilities.
A senior association executive who spends his weeks with independent agency owners gave the same ranking when asked, unprompted, what they will actually spend on this year: visibility first, profitability second, and everything else fighting for room. That is one experienced observer's impression, not a measurement. It points the same way the survey does.
These are intentions, stated in late 2025, for a year now three-quarters gone. Read them as the mood firms planned under, not as a record of what they spent.
RSW/US sells outbound new-business services and runs an agency-search business, and its report recommends investing in exactly that. The sample is drawn from more than 5,000 firms; the number that responded is not published.
Visibility is evidenced by the channel data. Profitability as a purchase driver is not; it rests on reasoning and on one observer's read. If you trust only the measured half, trust visibility.
The web-search shift is about discovery, not selection. A client who finds you through search may still hire on referral. The data shows how firms enter the frame, not who wins.
- Your growth plan has no line item beside it — nothing in the budget changes whether the plan is achieved or abandoned.
- Every tool you considered this year was justified by hours saved — none by revenue named or cost removed, so the decision had nothing to rest on.
- You know your new-business target but not how your last three clients found you — the routes are measurable, and they are moving.
- Your best referral sources went quiet and you read it as a slow patch — networking fell fifteen points and friends-and-co-workers twenty-five in three years. That is the road, not your patch.
- You decline purchases with "not right now" instead of naming the budget — the phrase is doing a number's job, and you cannot tell a bad offer from a mistimed one.
This week, ask your last three new clients exactly how they found you, and what they typed if they typed anything.
Not how agencies get found in general; how they found your firm, who mentioned you, what they searched, and what they read before the first call. Three short calls or emails. Write the answers in one table. Then fund the single route that shows up most, with a real number beside it and a named line it displaces, and leave the others unfunded on purpose.
- What it costs
- An hour across three conversations, the mild awkwardness of asking clients about their own buying, and then whatever the one funded line costs, taken from something you stop doing.
- How you'll know
- By the end of the week you can name the route behind your last three wins. Within two quarters, the funded route produces more first conversations than it did before, counted the same way. If it does not, move the money to the second route and say so.
More than half the market has decided to wait, findable only by routes that are shrinking. That is the opening. It does not require outspending anyone. It requires one funded line, aimed at how clients now find firms, while most of the market funds none.
Related from Sound Decisions: Your Next Client Is Already Inside This One · Anyone Can Look Like You Now · They’ll Pay for the Work. They Won’t Pay for the Thinking.
One conversation. The one line worth funding.
Not a marketing plan. A read on how your recent clients actually found you, and which route deserves the money.
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