Audience Audit

Custom segmentation solutions for smart agencies and their clients.

Turns Out: Confidence came back, so did the alarm

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October 2026  ·  Issue 3
Turns out agency confidence rebounded and the number of leaders who say their agency needs big changes went up at the same time.
Agency Core has now run three times — 2022, 2025 and 2026 — and ten statements have been asked in every wave. Two of them are optimism about the agency’s own opportunities, and agreement that the agency needs to make big changes.

What you would expect is that those two lines run in opposite directions. Leaders who feel good about the future should be the ones who feel least need to overhaul anything; leaders who think the model is broken should be the gloomy ones.

What the data says is that both went up. Confidence recovered some of the ground it lost in 2025, and the share saying their agency has to make big changes went up anyway — as it has in every wave.

Two three-wave trends among agency leaders. Optimism about their agency's opportunities: 74 percent in 2022, 47 percent in 2025, 53 percent in 2026. My agency needs to make big changes to succeed: 16 percent, 25 percent, 33 percent.

The comfortable reading is that the industry took its knock in 2025 and is coming back. The uncomfortable one is that a third of agency leaders now say the thing they run needs to be substantially different, and that share has doubled since 2022 without ever pausing.

Both can be true at once, and I think they are. Belief that there is opportunity out there has come back. Confidence in the machine that is supposed to go and get it has not, and that is a far more specific problem than a bad mood — which is good news, because specific problems have moving parts you can reach.

Pipeline has been the number one challenge in every wave of this study — 67% name it this year. Half now also name demonstrating their competitive advantage, and half name getting clients to pay what they are worth.

Susan’s Take

Optimism that is not attached to a plan is just a mood.

The useful version is the one where a leader can finish the sentence — optimistic because we changed how we sell, because we know which problem we solve, because the last three clients came to us. If the sentence stops at “optimistic,” that is all you have, and it will not survive a slow quarter.

Two of the three worries this industry names sit downstream of a single decision: you cannot demonstrate a competitive advantage you have not settled on, and you certainly cannot charge for one. So if you are walking into planning with “grow the pipeline” on the list, I would put these to the team first:

  • What did the last three clients who came to us say they were looking for? If nobody can answer that, the pipeline problem is a positioning problem.
  • Which of our services would we be comfortable being known for, to the exclusion of the others?
  • If a prospect asked why us rather than the agency down the road, could everyone in this room give the same answer?

None of that needs a research budget. It needs an hour, and a willingness to hear different perspectives within your own team.
See the research
Or take the 2-minute quiz — optimism is back at 53%, but see if you can place where it sat when Agency Core started tracking this in 2022.
Susan

I write with AI as my co-author. The ideas, the advice and the final read are mine.

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