‘Brands don’t need another dashboard’: Agency execs on the ‘data partner’ paradigm

Emma Dean, communications strategist, AML: “It’s not about the data; it’s about the people. For agencies to be true data partners, we need to build real-life human networks. Analogue, sticky relationships, not just smart (but impersonal) dashboards and reporting. Digital natives who can spot opportunities clients might miss, from a holistic understanding of the client’s business, audience and ambition. Get to know the data specialist who isn’t your day-to-day contact. Use human learning, not just machine learning; share knowledge and experiences and be open to change. Don’t be driven by data. Drive the data.”

Ausrine Valentiniene, data analytics director, Rapp: “If agencies want to be true data partners, they need to stop admiring the data and start using it. The most important move right now is operationalizing client data in a way that drives decisions, not just decks. That means embedding data strategists into client teams, building tools that surface insights in real time and making sure those insights are actually actionable. Here’s a curveball: run a ‘data fire drill.’ Strip away the brief, the campaign, the context. Ask, ‘What can the data tell us right now?’ It’s a fast, messy, brilliant way to test agility and prove value. Clients don’t need more reports. They need partners that turn complexity into clarity and clarity into action.”

Ted Kohnen, chief executive, Park & Battery: “Agencies should stop acting like lab techs in white coats and start behaving like personal trainers: sweating alongside clients, shouting the next rep and keeping them on pace. Being a data partner doesn’t simply involve handing over charts; it’s about turning raw numbers into a daily to-do list that moves the needle. The smartest play right now? ‘Decision-ready dashboards’ that analyze the data, cut the fluff and suggest two or three actions a client should take today (call this customer, shift budget here, kill that campaign). Data doesn’t win in PowerPoints; it wins in the muscle memory of everyday decisions.”

Jennifer Dira, senior vice-president, account service, Lewis: “Clients rarely suffer from too little data; the challenge is translating it into decisions. Agencies can add the most value by ruthlessly prioritizing a few actionable metrics and building work around them. That means helping clients consolidate reporting into a single source of truth (not multiple dashboards), defining one or two business outcomes that matter most and then aligning creative and media activation against those. For example, reframing data as hypotheses to test (‘Will shifting spend by 10% toward X audience improve acquisition?’) turns data from static reporting into a springboard for experimentation and growth.”

Dan Wilson, chief data officer, Charlie Oscar: “Stop talking about the work. Yes, you used cutting-edge data toolkits and plugged into AI solutions that were only created two weeks ago. Great, but nobody really cares. Stop telling clients what you did. Start telling them what you think they should do about it. The value is in the insight, not in the process you went through to get there. Process might have been 80% of your time, but it shouldn’t even be 8% of what you deliver to your client. The insight has the power to change a client’s business. Ideally, it should be as simple as possible. ‘Stop doing this’ or ‘do more of that.’ It’s the insight that holds all the value and should command all of your client’s focus. That’s what makes you a data partner, not a data provider.”

Jason Warner, managing director UK & EMEA, SBS: “Agencies often assume that being a stronger data partner means buying more tools, but the real shift we’re seeing is around collaboration and interpretation. Our recent study found that 90% of independent agencies are already teaming up to deliver broader services, with over half saying these partnerships have expanded their capabilities. Collaboration isn’t just a growth strategy; it’s a blueprint for how to approach client data. Clients don’t need another dashboard or spreadsheet; they need sharper, more specialized advice on how to apply insight to specific campaigns, categories or markets. That means cutting through the noise, turning data into stories that drive clear decisions. With 71% of agencies still citing tech adoption as a barrier, the opportunity isn’t more software. It’s a smarter use of the talent and expertise already in play. The agencies that succeed will be those who translate information into clarity, context and impact.”

Amar Vyas, chief data & technology officer, M+C Saatchi Fluency: “Being a client’s true data partner means not just delivering dashboards but actively shaping how decisions get made. The most practical step agencies can take right now is to build ‘living experiments’ into their clients’ marketing systems. This means treating every campaign, audience segment or channel as a mini test bed that continuously feeds intelligence back into the broader strategy. It turns data from a rear-view mirror into a forward-looking compass and demands experimentation frameworks (geo-lifts, synthetic controls, rapid MMM adjustments) as a default, not an add-on. It positions data as the driving force that connects brands to cultural power through audience insight and understanding. Borrowing from product design, agencies should run client ‘data sprints’ where hypotheses are tested in weeks, not quarters, with learnings baked directly into creative and media strategy. Done well, the agency becomes an extension of the client’s team.”

Don Skinner, chief operating officer, Anything is Possible: “Make question design (QD) the first deliverable. With generative AI in regular use at roughly two‑thirds of organisations, data is ever more abundant. Thus, answers become cheap. But questions have real value: knowing the right questions to ask, the right way to ask them and the right sources to interrogate are real skills. Clients should hold agency partners to a simple ritual: a weekly, 30‑minute QD clinic that produces a tiny set of action‑tests. Frame each one as an intervention with teeth: If we change X by Y% for Z weeks, will metric M lift by at least T within agreed guardrails? Tie every question to a lever, a time window, a success threshold and a rollback rule. Ship one small decision from that list and log the outcome.”

Rosie Gentile, practice lead, North America, FCB/Six: “In a world where context is king, getting weather-aware is the way to go. The weather profoundly influences consumer behavior, yet it’s often overlooked. Accessing historical and real-time weather data via APIs and overlaying it with client data reveals powerful correlations that drive smarter decisions. Does the first snowfall freeze spending? Do heat waves increase search activity for new recipes? Does heavy rainfall lengthen online engagement, making it ideal for gamified activations? Platforms and apps such as The Weather Channel are a starting point and also include a dual benefit of being able to advertise within the network, so it’s time to tap into the forecast, connect insights to the world, anticipate consumer needs and inform more relevant, responsive strategies.”

Chris Camacho, chief executive, Cheil UK: “Being a true data partner means obsessing over use, not just access. Most brands don’t need another dashboard; they need a decision engine. Agencies should focus on activation intelligence, taking the messy data clients already have and turning it into automated, high-impact decisions across media, content and commerce. The single most important move? Build an AI sandbox for each client, a controlled environment where their data, models and creative can be tested and iterated in real time. Think of it as a virtual lab for insight, not just reporting. This shifts data from being a lagging indicator to a living asset that shapes strategy. Most dashboards tell you what happened. A data partner helps you decide what to do next.”

Barney Worfolk-Smith, chief growth officer, Daivid: “It’s the creative, stupid. Agencies are under pressure to demonstrate beneficial outcomes to their clients. The single biggest lever to pull to improve performance is a data-led understanding of the creative flowing through the dumb pipes of advertising. It does, after all, contribute about half of the final success of an ad. It’s a huge gray area. But put creative data alongside media performance (or, even better, sales data) and the performance upticks will be huge.”

Ken Goodbody, associate partner, Interstate: “Agencies can add real value by helping clients move from data overwhelm to data action, driven by original creative thinking. Giant ‘lakes’ of latent data are common in large organizations, but without applied context, they stall decision-making or meaningful use. The role of a creative partner is to cut through that noise with lateral thinking: framing data as fuel for a narrative or function, not just a technical resource or byproduct. That might mean turning live streams of manufacturing data into modular, data-powered products with outputs clear enough to be understood by different audience segments and actionable across markets. It’s less about the tools themselves and more about applying a creative mindset: treating data as raw material for storytelling and delivering solutions that are elegant, scalable and genuinely useful.”

David DiCamillo, chief technology officer, Code and Theory: “Agencies can provide huge value by assisting with data activation, specifically leveraging in-house data to deliver growth. All clients have an internal data practice and, most likely, even a well-orchestrated data lake collecting data points around the company. What they often don’t have is the creative know-how to bring use cases to life: CRM/social communications, personalization, product development, insight mining, customer patterning and, of course, numerous AI instances. Showing clients the business growth opportunities within their data both adds value to their internal efforts (justifying the expensive setup) and makes agency partners incredibly sticky when they can prove their value to the client’s bottom line.”

Trevis Milton, head of automation and AI Solutions, Apollo Partners: “The most salient thing an agency can do right now to support clients in data transformation is to help them achieve a unified data foundation. Clients need a clear roadmap for migrating data to a cloud data warehouse like BigQuery. Without a unified and grounded data foundation, advanced analytics and AI will not succeed. Agencies must expand capabilities beyond media planning to partner with clients on a data readiness journey that includes assessment and enablement phases. While agencies can support CMOs in leading this effort, the real opportunity is to consolidate all data (media, CRM, user signals, sales) into a single source of truth for the entire organization. This unified foundation will unlock decision-making power through collective intelligence, ensuring that clients are truly set up for the age of data and AI.”

Jeremy Whitt, executive media director, Hanson Dodge: “Be their data integrator. Either own or help clients put the pipes together so all their sales, media, CRM and DTC data is all in one place. Then use analytics tech so it can be normalized, queried, evaluated by AI and used to identify practical insights that weren’t otherwise imagined.”

Robyn Cauchy, vice-president, research & data products, Gale: “Agencies are racing to show they can add more value by folding generative AI into their service delivery. As we’ve explored how to implement marketing and insights solutions with AI, we’ve realized three essentials for getting reliable outputs from AI tools: a shared understanding of the data ecosystem, a thoughtful semantic layer and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) implementation. Agencies that know how to help clients through these data preparation steps will find a new revenue stream. Agencies that don’t will face hallucinations, bias and eroding client trust.”

Phil Case, president, Max Connect Digital: “If you want to be indispensable as a data partner, stop reporting what happened last month and start predicting what’s likely to happen next. Predictive models only work if you have a strong grasp of the past, so the opportunity is to turn historical data into forward-looking guidance. Agencies should focus on building lightweight predictive tools that combine past patterns with real-time signals to forecast demand shifts, cost fluctuations or audience churn. Nothing too crazy. Sometimes, even simple regression beats waiting for dashboards to update. Clients don’t need another rearview mirror; they need headlights. The single most practical step is adopting tools that both learn from history and anticipate what’s around the corner. In a world of constant volatility, foresight built on hindsight is the new currency of trust.”

David Matathia, executive vice-president, strategy, TMA: “Shift from single data points to signals. It’s too easy (and often a trap) to react to a single data point and orient plans accordingly. The biggest value we can add is finding the patterns that emerge from aggregating multiple data points to form real, actionable insights. Creating unique indices (or other custom measures) that combine metrics into digestible takeaways to inform learning agenda or proactive solutions is how we’ll win. With AI enablement, this is more achievable than ever. We can take multiple data feeds and train our systems to instantly handle the analysis, giving a head start on insight development.”

Matt Kaupa, director of analytics, Luquire: “Channel your inner five-year-old: honesty is non-negotiable. Don’t sugarcoat findings, cherry-pick data, or sprinkle in fake ‘multipliers’ to make numbers shine (yes, people do this). Dishonest data kills insights faster than a bad PowerPoint. One false move, and your client trust evaporates. It’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but with spreadsheets. Real, accurate, unvarnished data may not always be flattering, but it’s the only path to credibility, smarter decisions and, honestly, keeping your job sane.”

Mike Monaco, marketing analytics leader, Kepler: “It’s easy for things to get messy in any data-centric organization. Eventually, you’ll have data stored in a dozen different places and no one can agree on what to call anything. This creates a bottleneck where every simple data question turns into a treasure hunt. Instead of focusing on big business challenges, your team spends countless hours sifting through dashboards just to find a single answer. That's where agencies focused on the power of centralized data infrastructure, clean customer data and consistent naming conventions can thrive. By establishing these essential ingredients, you can democratize the ‘small stuff.’ Your team can get immediate, accurate answers to data questions without having to track down a data analyst. This frees up valuable time and resources, allowing everyone to focus on the truly thorny problems that drive your business forward.”

Taylor Miles, vice-president, consumer engagement, Two Tango: “Agencies can help clients cut through the noise of last-click metrics. That endless scroll of platform-reported return on ad spend (ROAS)? It’s not the full story and everyone knows it. Instead, help clients build simple, always-on test-and-learn setups that prove what’s moving the needle. Think geo split-tests, message holdouts or plain A/B experiments. Confirm whether that new headline nudges real conversions or just vanity metrics.”

Andrew Karlovsky, director of data & analytics, Attention Arc: “The word ‘partner’ is crucial. True partnership requires full access to data and, in return, the trust to be completely honest about what it’s telling us. My role is to show what is truly moving the needle to drive profit and revenue. Effective data doesn't just represent a part of their business; it represents their whole business and the impact we can have on it. My life is spent living out this partnership. It starts with listening deeply to clients and strategists to understand goals and workflow, then translating plans into measurable frameworks and trackable datapoints. The final, crucial step is building intuitive dashboards, insightful models and functional tools that help partners make the best decisions possible.”

Earl Potter, senior vice-president, media analytics, Rise: “Agencies must help clients unlock the hidden potential in their first-party data through strategic augmentation. Client data reveals what customers purchased, but not why (or what’s next). Agencies should be the bridge between transactional data and actionable insights. Ingest clients’ first-party data then match and enrich it with external identifiers and behavioral profiles. This transforms basic purchase history into a comprehensive customer understanding that spans interests, attitudes and behaviors beyond a client’s four walls. Take insurance: a client knows which policies customers hold but not which additional products to sell or how to message them effectively. Should they pitch boat insurance or renters’ coverage? What creative resonates? Data augmentation answers these questions by revealing lifestyle indicators, life-stage signals and channel preferences.”

Jo Hayes, executive director, strategy, Barbarian: “Data ≠ numbers. Data = people. Consumers are skeptical of brands that seem to know too much. Instead of surveillance-style data collection, smart agencies build first-party data relationships that feel conversational, not covert. That means helping brands activate the data they already have: clean it, connect it and put it to work. For new data, set up direct feedback loops: surveys that don’t suck, social listening beyond vanity metrics, and (revolutionary concept!) talking to customers. Use those insights to fuel powerful creative, not a creepy cookie-pushed catcall. Then layer in tech that organizes and amplifies those human insights at scale. Data becomes powerful when it builds understanding, not apprehension. Clients don’t need another vendor promising unicorn targeting; they need a partner who remembers that behind every data point is a person. The agencies that stand out are the ones that sit next to the CMO and say, ‘Your customers already told you what they want, are you listening?’”

Pedro Avery, co-founder, Bicycle London: “The paradigm has shifted. Clients need to stop expecting ‘the earth’ from one magical solution and start expecting tangible, incremental results in a single business quarter. The role of the agency is no longer just to buy media and report on it. It’s to provide a clear, honest diagnosis of the client’s data health and then execute a disciplined plan that makes the entire business measurably healthier. Clients: stop accepting reports on what happened. Start demanding a plan that proves why it will be better next month.”