In March 2026 there were 29,420 advertising, media and PR agencies in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics. That’s almost certainly an undercount, though, because the figure omits businesses that aren’t registered for VAT or PAYE.
Nonetheless, the data is a useful indicator of how much the industry has grown. Since 2010, the number of trading agencies in the UK has increased by 64%. Since 2025, it’s gone up 7%.
Meanwhile, roughly comparable data from the US by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which counts offices rather than businesses — shows an even larger increase, of 82% between 2010 and 2025.
The broad trend, then, is that there are substantially more agency partners for marketers to choose from than there were 15 years ago. The difficulty, however, is not just that there are more, it’s that there are more kinds of agencies, too.
New technologies, fragmenting media and experiments with alternative business models are reshaping the market. Our efforts to map the independent agency landscape show how its changing.
DCA’s dataset comprises 7,768 independent creative, marketing and communications agencies across 14 markets, and it’s growing all the time.
Our findings show that just 6% of agencies founded after 2010 describe themselves as primarily creative and advertising businesses, compared with 14% of those founded in the preceding two decades. Increasingly, agencies are emerging that are unbundling (or bundling) existing services, specialising in new niches, or providing new services to marketers altogether.
The data also shows that agencis are claiming more expertise than ever. Cross-referencing DCA data with archival information shows that the median agency now claims expertise across six of the 14 disciplines that we track, compared with just four in 2016. Over that same time period, the number of agencies claiming expertise in 10 or more disciplines has risen from 15% to 31%.
And yet, only 29% of the agency websites that we analysed included case studies to support every claimed specialism — a figure that falls to 10% when it’s limited to case studies that demonstrate results. AI is the least evidenced of the 14 disciplines we track, with 64% of agencies that claim this expertise publishing no evidence to support their assertions.
An absence of case studies does not necessarily indicate an absence of expertise, of course, but it does illustrate one of the difficulties that marketers run into when trying to assess agencies’ capabilities at first instance.
Our new Terra Incognita report describes six of the biggest shifts taking place among agencies (and marketing teams). It also provides a field guide for how marketers can navigate the larger, more complex landscape and find the right partner for their challenge or goal. You can read it here. We hope that you find it useful.
