We analysed every marketing company incorporated in the UK since January 2025, all 29,609 of them, read the filed accounts of the industry from FTSE groups to one-person studios, and pulled the major benchmark surveys together in one place. This is what the market actually looks like, with sources for every number, written for the business owners deciding where their marketing money goes.
marketing companies incorporated in the UK since January 2025
Companies House register, analysed by Mode, July 2026of the January 2025 cohort already dissolved within 18 months
Companies House register, analysed by Mode, July 2026of the new generation have filed accounts showing real operation
Companies House filings, analysed by Mode, July 2026agency hourly rates fell in 2024, the first fall on record, before a partial recovery in 2025
BenchPress 2025 & 2026, The Wow Companyof UK agencies say clients have taken work in-house because of AI
BenchPress 2026, The Wow Companycreative agency employment in 2025, while marketing budgets hit a two-year high
IPA Census 2025 · IPA Bellwether Q1 2026The 2025 results season was the industry's worst in a generation. WPP's revenue fell 8.1% and it left the FTSE 100 after almost three decades; its new chief executive has said it will no longer operate as a holding company at all. S4 Capital posted its third consecutive annual decline. M&C Saatchi fell 9.2%, The Mission Group 21%, and Dentsu recorded an approximately $2 billion loss and is refocusing on Japan. Across three groups alone, more than 15,000 roles were cut in 2025. All figures are from the companies' own published results.
The two winners are instructive. Publicis grew 5.6% organically with record margins, and Accenture Song grew 8% to roughly $20 billion. What they share is not size but shape: both monetise data platforms and technology rather than billable hours. The market is not punishing agencies, it is punishing the sale of time.
Using the Companies House register, we pulled all 29,609 UK companies incorporated under marketing SIC codes between 1 January 2025 and July 2026, roughly 1,600 new “agencies” a month, a rate that has not slowed. Then we checked how they are doing.
The headline: the January 2025 cohort is already 27% dissolved, eighteen months after incorporation, and a further 17% of survivors are overdue on their first statutory filing. Nearly all of these die by never engaging with the register at all: they are abandoned shells and side-projects, not trading businesses that failed. A fifth of the entire population is registered at about six virtual-office addresses.
Only 2.3% of the new generation has filed accounts demonstrating real operation. Among those that have, the pattern is striking: the successful ones are overwhelmingly specialist and small, a kids'-sector media agency, a solo TikTok educator, a fashion retoucher, a TV publicist. We found no successful new full-service generalist. And in eighteen months of national incorporation data, the number of new companies named for generative engine optimisation, the discipline of being found by AI, was effectively zero.
Method: Companies House Advanced Search API + bulk register snapshot, four marketing SIC codes (73110, 70210, 73120, 73200), deduplicated; survival measured against company status and filing records, July 2026. We publish this so it can be checked.
The Wow Company's BenchPress survey, the UK's largest independent-agency benchmark, recorded two firsts for 2024: gross profit below 40% for the first time in the survey's history, and hourly rates falling for the first time ever, with mid-level, senior and director tier rates down 4%. 2025 brought a partial recovery: average blended rates rose to £104 per hour for smaller agencies and £122 for larger ones, and gross profit recovered to its best level in four years.
Underneath the recovery, the average smaller agency still runs a 14% operating margin, one in six made no profit at all, and Moore Kingston Smith's 2025 survey found digital agencies' income actually declined 6.5%. Meanwhile the Prolific North Top 50 grew combined turnover 17% while combined profit fell 63%: much of the industry is buying growth with margin.
The consistent bright spot in every dataset is the same: specialists. BenchPress finds clearly differentiated agencies convert 49% of proposals against 31% for generalists, and its own prescription to struggling agencies is, verbatim, “the power of productisation.”
UK marketing budgets are at a near two-year high (IPA Bellwether, Q1 2026) and UK ad spend reached £46.7 billion in 2025, up 6.4%. Yet agency employment is falling, creative agency headcount dropped 14.3% in 2025 and under-25 employment fell 19.2% (IPA Census). We checked the live job boards to see whether the census finding still holds: on 13 July 2026, UK listings mentioning “marketing director” outnumbered those mentioning “junior marketing” by 718 to 108 (Adzuna keyword counts · a blunt but repeatable measure we will keep tracking). The industry is hiring leadership while AI absorbs the entry layer. Demand is fine; the fee is being captured elsewhere, by platforms, by AI tools, and by clients doing more themselves.
UK agencies themselves quantify it: 36–38% say clients have taken work in-house because of AI, and roughly 3 in 10 say clients now expect to pay less (BenchPress 2026). What AI removes first is routine production, junior copy, templated design, boilerplate content. What it has not replaced is judgment, accountability, and the finished, working result: the last mile between a plausible draft and a live business asset.
One number worth sitting with: only 5–13% of agencies have actually measured the impact AI is having on their own business. Most of the industry is adopting the tools without knowing what they change.
Check the register. A quarter of new agencies are gone within 18 months. Companies House is free: look for a real filing history, a real address, and accounts on time. It is the same check AI assistants increasingly run when someone asks whether a company is legitimate.
Ask who does the work. Much of the market is an account-management layer over junior or subcontracted delivery, and the same wholesale production lines sit behind many different agency brands. The question that cuts through: will the person I brief be the person who builds?
Prefer published prices. In our research across incumbents and the entire new generation, published pricing is vanishingly rare, quote-only is the norm. A published, fixed price reflects a fixed scope and a cost base its owner understands. Opacity usually protects a margin, not a method.
Ask about AI, and expect honesty. The right answer is not “we don't use it” and not “AI does everything.” It is: openly, for speed and consistency, with senior judgment on what ships. And if being found by AI matters to you, ask what they would measure, anyone promising guaranteed AI citations is selling something no one controls.
Around 55,000 companies are registered under the advertising-agency SIC code, but industry estimates put genuinely trading agencies at roughly 20,000 to 25,000. The register carries a long tail of dormant and never-traded entities: when Mode analysed every marketing company incorporated since January 2025, roughly a fifth were registered at just six virtual-office addresses.
Faster and more often than the economy-wide numbers suggest. Of the 29,609 marketing companies incorporated since January 2025, the January 2025 cohort was already 27% dissolved within 18 months, and a further 17% of survivors were overdue on their first confirmation statement. Most die by never engaging with the register at all, they are abandoned rather than insolvent.
Agency hourly rates fell in 2024 for the first time in the 14-year history of the UK’s largest agency benchmarking survey (BenchPress, The Wow Company), with mid-level, senior and director tier rates down 4%. Rates partially recovered in 2025, the average blended rate for smaller agencies rose 7% to £104 per hour, but around 3 in 10 agencies say clients now expect to pay less because of AI.
It is replacing parts of them. 36–38% of UK agencies report clients have taken work in-house because of AI (BenchPress 2026), creative agency employment fell 14.3% in 2025 (IPA Census), and Forrester forecasts 15% of agency jobs will go in 2026. But marketing budgets are at a two-year high, the money is moving, not shrinking. Work that survives is judgment, accountability and specialist delivery rather than routine production.
Four things the data says matter: check the company on the Companies House register (age, filing record, real address, a quarter of new agencies vanish within 18 months); ask exactly who will do the work (much of the industry is account-managed layers over junior or outsourced delivery); prefer published, fixed prices over quote-only (opaque pricing usually reflects an opaque cost base); and ask how the agency uses AI, the honest answer is openly, for efficiency, with senior judgment on top.
Companies House register and filed accounts (analysed by Mode Marketing, July 2026) · The Wow Company, BenchPress 2025 and 2026 · IPA Agency Census 2025 · IPA Bellwether Report Q1 2026 · Moore Kingston Smith, Financial Performance of Marketing Services Companies 2025 · Prolific North Top 50 Digital Agencies 2025 · AA/WARC Expenditure Report 2025-26 · ONS Business Demography 2024 · published company results: WPP, Publicis Groupe, S4 Capital, M&C Saatchi, The Mission Group, Dentsu, Accenture, Next 15 · Forrester 2026 predictions. Figures are reported as published by each source; where sources conflict we cite the more conservative number. Errors ours; corrections welcome at hello@modemarketing.ai.
Mode is a UK studio built the way the data says works: fixed scope, published prices, senior delivery, and engineered to be found by AI. If you want to know whether AI recommends your business, start with the number.
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