Agencies’ Most Important Industry Trends in 2023

Posted by Faye Martinez | April 19, 2023 | Filed under: Industry Articles

Social video has been deemed by marketers to be their most important consumer trend of this year.

As such agencies appear to be largely in agreement regarding a new report from RSW/US indicating that short-form video is the trend that agencies believe will be most impactful to the industry and/or their clients this year.

69% of respondents named this one of the most impactful trends of the year, on par with the percentage who said the same in last year’s report. 

This is far and away the area of broadest consensus, as the next-most cited trends in this latest report fail to broach the majority threshold. Nonetheless, after short-form videos, influencer marketing (43%) and delivering personalized experiences through smart technologies (43%) are the next-most cited impactful trends for the industry and/or agencies’ clients. 

Compared to last year, the delivery of personalized experiences appears to have faded somewhat as a trend in agencies’ eyes, while influencer marketing has gained steam. Close behind in this year’s survey, story-driven content visualization (41%) is also rising up the ranks as an impactful trend.

By contrast, agencies are not at all enthused by the metaverse, with just 4% naming it one of the most impactful trends of the year. Although some marketers are investing in the metaverse, Americans have largely proven apathetic to the idea of virtual worlds.

Turning to a separate ongoing trend of in-housing, the results show some conflicting views. Just this year, 13% of agencies say that the majority of their clients have in-house agencies or do agency-like work in-house, down from 17% last year. However, twice as many (33%) expect their clients to move more agency-like work in-house than for this type of work to decrease (16%). (This may be a contributing factor to agencies’ new business generation difficulties this year.)

Moreover, marketers are far more likely than agencies to say that the majority of their work occurs in-house. Almost half (47%) of marketers participating in an accompanying survey reported that the majority of their marketing/advertising activity is managed by an in-house marketing/advertising team, with this share up from last year’s report (39%).

Finally, in an environment of economic uncertainty, only 36% of agencies surveyed for the report expect that their clients will increase marketing spend “significantly” or “somewhat” this year, about half the share (73%) who said the same for 2022.

For more, download the study here.

About the Data: The results are based on a November/December 2022 survey of 125 senior-level marketers and 155 marketing agency executives in the US and Canada.