Reclaiming media’s value: the evolving role of agencies in a more complex landscape

This blog is Part 2 of a series on the evolving role of media agencies. Read Part 1 here.

The media ecosystem has never been more dynamic—or more difficult to navigate. Inflationary pressures, the rapid rise of retail media, fragmented measurement, and declining confidence in attribution have all contributed to a growing sense of uncertainty among marketers. Against this backdrop, agencies face a pivotal question: how do we help restore media’s role as a true driver of business value and competitive advantage?

That question anchored a recent discussion amongst the CMA Media Council in December, focused on the future role of agencies in an increasingly complex media landscape. What emerged was both a diagnosis of the challenges and a call to action for the industry.

Media inflation and the value paradox

Media inflation is no longer a theoretical concern—it’s a lived reality. Inflation today ranges from 0.4 per cent to as high as 10 per cent across channels, with research showing the highest inflation occurring in the channels attracting the most investment. The challenge? Those same channels are often delivering shrinking marginal value.

This creates a paradox for marketers: they are spending more in places that are becoming less efficient, while struggling to clearly understand the trade-offs. In this environment, the historical promise of media—scalable reach, efficient growth, measurable impact—feels increasingly fragile.

The implication for agencies is clear: optimization alone is no longer enough. Futureproof strategies must reconnect investment decisions to tangible business outcomes, not just media metrics.

Retail media: growth, pressure and fragmentation

Few forces are reshaping media faster than retail media. In Canada alone, retail media ad spending was projected to reach $3.7 billion in 2025, with the market expected to surpass $6 billion by 2028. Growth remains strong, driven by closed-loop data, proximity to purchase, and increasing interest in both off-platform extensions and in-store activations.

But this growth is also creating pressure:

• Retail media is straining marketing budgets already impacted by inflation.
• Audience fragmentation is intensifying, making holistic planning harder.
• Measurement often remains confined within retailer ecosystems, limiting visibility into broader impact.

Retail media is also evolving operationally—shifting from managed services toward self-service models. While this may increase accessibility, it can also exacerbate complexity and transparency challenges if not thoughtfully integrated into broader media strategies.

The measurement crisis: when media became a “black box”

Perhaps the most consistent theme from the discussion was a crisis of confidence in measurement.

Many marketers feel they no longer understand what their media dollars are actually delivering. Vendors and certain channels have become “black boxes,” each with their own buying models, KPIs and attribution systems. Measurement lives inside individual ecosystems—and rarely speaks across them.

The result:

• Limited visibility into cause and effect.
• Inability to understand how retail media influences the rest of the marketing mix.
• Growing skepticism around traditional attribution models.

While some progress is being made—such as retail activity folding into cross-channel interfaces—the journey remains far from linear.

This is where Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is experiencing renewed interest. Marketers are increasingly requesting it as a way to regain a macro-level understanding of performance. But MMM is not a silver bullet. It requires investment, clean data and robust connectors—none of which are trivial to implement.

Media literacy as a competitive advantage

One of the more uncomfortable—but necessary—questions raised was whether media has simply become too complicated for people to follow, leading to disengagement. Do marketers truly understand what they’re buying? Do organizations understand how media drives incremental revenue?

At the heart of this is media literacy.

Media literacy today must extend well beyond marketing teams. Legal, privacy, security and data teams all need a shared understanding of:

• Signal health and integrity,
• Data privacy and futureproofing, and
• Incrementality versus correlation

Understanding incrementality is a critical first step. However, education requires time, resources and maturity. Not every organization is starting from the same place, which makes a one-size-fits-all approach unrealistic.

This creates an opportunity—and responsibility—for agencies.

The agency imperative: from execution to enablement

Agencies are navigating their own pressures: new revenue streams, evolving operating models, and increasing demands for strategic leadership. But this moment calls for clarity around what clients are truly hiring agencies to do.

Are agencies being hired simply to execute media buys? Or are they being hired as partners to help drive business growth?

Answering that question requires:

• Challenging conversations upfront, including honest discussions about cost, value and expectations.
• Acknowledging that strategic thinking costs money, but also delivers disproportionate value.
• Ensuring there is senior leadership at the helm—someone who can connect insights across channels, not just within them.

Agencies also have a role to play in rebuilding “common sense” business practices in media—helping clients analyze buys, understand trade-offs and focus on what actually drives revenue.

Creating alignment in a fragmented world

So how does the industry move forward?

It starts by reframing conversations around value delivery. That language resonates not just with marketing, but with legal, privacy, finance and executive stakeholders. Using consulting frameworks to structure proposals can help bridge internal silos and create shared understanding.

Efficiency is often easier to prove than attribution, but both matter. Marketers will need to make deliberate choices about priorities, supported by:

• Holistic planning across specialized channel teams,
• The right data pipelines between clients, agencies and partners, and
• A clearer articulation of each partner’s role and contribution.

Understanding who brings value—and where—is essential to recalibrating attribution and investment decisions.

Looking ahead

Media has never been more powerful or more difficult to manage. Inflationary pressures, the rapid expansion of retail media, fragmented measurement, and declining confidence in attribution have created a paradox for marketers: investment is rising while clarity around value is eroding. As costs increase in the very channels attracting the most spend, marginal returns are shrinking and the historical promise of media efficiency feels increasingly fragile.

The path forward requires a shift from optimization to intention. Media decisions must be anchored in business outcomes, not just channel performance metrics. Perfect attribution may no longer be realistic, but purpose-driven investment is. Marketers should treat inflation as a strategic signal, pressure-testing where spend is truly delivering incremental impact rather than defaulting to familiarity or scale.

Retail media exemplifies both the opportunity and the risk ahead. Its growth is undeniable, but without clear integration into broader media strategy, it can accelerate fragmentation and obscure learning. Evaluating retail media in isolation limits its potential; understanding how it influences the total marketing mix is essential.

Measurement remains a critical challenge. No single solution will restore confidence. While MMM is regaining relevance, it must be paired with experimentation, incrementality thinking, and acceptance of directional insight over false precision. Measurement should inform better decisions—not merely justify past spend.

Media literacy has therefore emerged as a true competitive advantage. Understanding how media drives incremental growth cannot sit solely within marketing teams. Legal, privacy, data and finance stakeholders all require a shared framework for evaluating value. Marketers can accelerate this learning by working more closely with the Canadian Marketing Association—leveraging its online resources and learning hub, participating in industry events and groups, and engaging in peer-to-peer dialogue with other marketers navigating similar challenges. These shared environments help demystify complexity, establish common language and promote practical, experience-led learning across organizations.

In a fragmented world, confidence is rebuilt through alignment, transparency and focus on what truly drives growth. Complexity is here to stay—but opacity doesn’t have to be.

Sources:

• Canada Post, There are holes in the bucket: Patching leaks amid advertising deficiencies.
• Mars United, Retail Media Report Card Canada, Spring 2025.

Authors:
Neil Cameron, Agency Development Partnership Lead – Canada, Reddit
Indresh Kohli, Executive Head of Marketing (Canada) & Head of Marketing Spend Effectiveness (International), Dr. Oetker