We name the top 10 most lauded network marketing shops from this year’s global The Drum Awards program.
Ketchum UK was ranked second in this year's The Drum Honors list of networked agencies, but which agency came top?
Yesterday, we launched the inaugural The Drum Honors fortnight, in which we’re celebrating the top-performing companies, campaigns and people in a blockbuster year for The Drum’s global Awards program.
We launched with our overall list of the 50 global agencies, across all disciplines, who took home the most gongs across the entirety of 2025. Now, we start digging into the data. Today, we’re revealing both the top network agencies and the top independent agencies.
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Over the coming week, we’ll drill down into categories, with rankings of the top-performing agencies across each of the disciplines (advertising, design, PR and communications, media, experiential, B2B, social, content, and digital experience) covered by our Awards program, as well as the top brands and advertisers in each of those categories.
Today’s list of the year’s 10 most-awarded network agencies works a little differently from the overall agencies list: here we treat agency networks (though not holding companies that sit above some of those networks) as single entities, grouping sub-brands and dispersed offices together. This gives us a holistic view of which groups are performing best across our categories (including not just creative, but the full marketing toolkit).
Coming out on top is, once again, Area 23, which took home Network Agency of the Year at this year’s The Drum Awards grand finale in London, the top spot in our Top 50 Agencies list in The Drum Honors, and the Editor’s Choice Award for its multi-gong showstopping work for Brazilian football club Gavião Kyikatêjê.
It’ll be welcome news for Area 23 as the agency embarks on a whole new chapter: a longtime IPG agency associated with FCB, it became a part of the reshuffled Omnicom Health as the dust settled on Omnicom’s IPG takeover just last week (and as the sunsetting of FCB was announced).
With Area 23 joining Omnicom, three of the top four network agencies in today’s ranking all report to the New York-headquartered holding company).
Taking the second spot, Omnicom comms shop Ketchum UK saw cross-category success for its smart and emotionally powerful ‘Liming with Gran’ campaign for Genomics England and the University of Cambridge.
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Sharing third place, both Hearts & Science (also of Omnicom) and VML (a WPP agency) benefited from multiple winning campaigns across global offices.
You can see the full list below.
| Rank | Network agency |
|---|---|
| 1 | Area23 |
| 2 | Ketchum UK |
| 3= | Hearts & Science |
| 3= | VML |
| 5 | Ogilvy |
| 6 | Code and Theory |
| 7= | Dentsu Creative |
| 7= | Golin |
| 9= | EssenceMediacom |
| 9= | Volare Advertising Network |
Want more? Check out all of the top winners from this year’s The Drum Honors, browse case studies of all the winning work from this year’s The Drum Awards festival, and mark your calendar for February, when we’ll unveil 2026’s World Creative Rankings.