Forrester Found the Biggest Agencies Alike: How to Tell Your Next SEM Partner Apart

As of November 2026, the honest answer to "which agency should we hire?" is that the largest ones are hard to tell apart on paper. Forrester's newest media management Wave, published on 9 November 2026 and reported by Digiday, assessed the 12 biggest agency groups and found that consolidation has pulled them towards the same shape. So if you are choosing a sem agency, you need a different kind of question: not "who is biggest," but "what can I check in my own account before I sign."

This piece is for the marketing lead at a Singapore SME or mid-market brand already spending on Google and Meta, deciding between a holding-company team and an independent shop. It sets out the criteria Forrester itself uses, the places where the research still finds real divergence, and a short list of things you can verify yourself. If you are weighing local options, the same questions work as a sem agency singapore shortlist test, and you can paste them into your next email.

What does the Forrester Wave actually measure?

Forrester's report is narrower than its title suggests, and knowing the boundary is the first useful step.

The Wave assessed the 12 biggest agency groups operating today. Scoring ran on 19 criteria, among them agentic media buying, customer lifecycle management and global delivery strategy. Forrester then sorted the field into tiers, with three groups named as leaders and the rest divided between strong performers and contenders.

Three facts about that method matter to a buyer:

• It is a study of groups, not of individual account teams. A group's score says nothing about the planner assigned to your Google Ads account.
• The criteria mix buying scale with operational questions, so a shop can rank well on one and poorly on the other.
• Inclusion had a floor. Groups below a $3.1 billion billings threshold were left out, along with those Forrester's clients were less interested in.

If your monthly media budget sits in the low or middle four figures, most of that field is not your shortlist anyway. The Wave is more useful as a map of what buyers are told to value than as a ranking of the vendors you will actually call.

Where do the biggest groups still differ?

They differ, but the differences show up in specific criteria rather than in a general impression of quality. Jay Pattisall, Forrester vice president and senior agency analyst and the report's principal author, told Digiday he had expected consolidation and acquisitions to widen the gaps. Once you look past scale and size, he said, the differences are much more subtle.

The scores bear that out. Publicis took the highest average score in strategy, which Forrester put at 4.4 from a possible top mark; Omnicom took the highest score in current offering at 3.8. Publicis was credited for its media buying, principal media and data and marketing sciences capabilities, while Omnicom benefited from being the largest buyer both domestically and globally. At the other end, Stagwell averaged 2.4 in strategy and 2.44 in current offering; Rise scored 1.6 in strategy and Dept 2.2.

Read as a pattern, the scores say this: a group can be strong in strategy and weak in execution evidence, or strong in buying volume and unclear on how it uses data. That is precisely the split a buyer can test locally, without waiting for another Wave.

Which questions actually separate two finalists?

Pattisall's explanation of Stagwell's lower score is the telling one. He attributed it partly to the newness of the Stagwell Media strategy and said the organisation's mission, vision and position were not as sharp as the others because it had been operating at that level for only a couple of months. Sameness, in other words, is partly a problem of how little operating evidence a group has at group level.

That reframes the shortlist. You cannot audit "strategy" in a pitch, but you can audit the paper trail behind it. Ask every finalist the same questions and ask for the same artefacts.

Notice that none of these asks about awards, case-study logos or the size of the group. Each one produces a document or a number the buyer keeps. If you can get that same evidence before the contract, the comparison moves from pitch decks to your own account, and the choice of sem agency becomes a decision you can defend to a finance director.

Gap filled: who are media buying agencies, in this context?

The people-also-ask set around this topic keeps returning to one plain question, and the Wave makes it worth answering precisely: who are the media buying agencies, and what are you actually hiring when you hire one?

At the top of the market, media buying agencies are the groups that commit large budgets across many channels and negotiate inventory and data on behalf of many brands at once. Their advantage is an aggregate position: buying scale, principal media arrangements, data and marketing sciences teams. Forrester's 12 groups are defined by that combination, and the $3.1 billion billings threshold is a reasonable proxy for entering the list.

Below that tier, an independent SEM shop does something different. It runs search and biddable channels inside one brand's accounts, tunes keywords, bids, landing pages and conversion tracking, and reports against the brand's own commercial outcomes. The skill set overlaps at the level of a criteria list and diverges at the level of daily work: the group negotiates and orchestrates, the specialist executes and optimises.

That distinction is why the homogeneity finding should not alarm a Singapore SME. What collapsed is differentiation among groups you were probably not buying from. For the specialist tier, differentiation still happens inside the account: in tracking, in funnel diagnosis, in whether anyone reads past the click.

Does the data debate change which agency you can trust?

The same Digiday briefing carried a second thread that bears on agency choice: Publicis closed its acquisition of data firm LiveRamp, following Federal Trade Commission stipulations on neutrality. LiveRamp is used by competing agencies and their clients, and the briefing asks whether some will now prefer their own services.

The buyer-side version of that question is simpler, and it applies to any size of agency: where does your customer data physically live, and who can access it after the contract ends? Identity, audience and conversion data that sits inside an agency-owned system becomes a switching cost. Data that stays in your own warehouse, under your own control, does not.

Put that to every finalist as a contract clause, not a courtesy. Where a brand is already comparing a local shop against a group, this is one of the few questions a sem agency singapore team can answer very concretely: name the account, the tenant and the export format. A proposal that answers only with "we'll give you a dashboard" has told you the answer.

How does Topkee approach the sameness problem?

The Wave's finding gives buyers a reason to look at what a partner can be held to. Topkee's approach is to make the comparison points contractual rather than rhetorical, and it rests on a handful of things a buyer can check.

Public pricing is the first. The company publishes three openly priced plans with monthly billing, no long-term lock-in and no separate platform setup fee. Media budget is paid directly through the client's own ad accounts, and data stays portable. Where the published threshold is missed, exit carries no penalty. These are terms, not assurances, which is what a "we're different" pitch usually lacks.

The second is data ownership. Accounts, data, optimisation history and platform assets remain in the client's own tenant and CDP, rather than in a reporting dashboard the client loses on exit. That answers the switching-cost question above at the level of architecture.

The third is evidence you can generate before committing. The funnel leak audit uses a two-minute, read-only authorisation, needs no system changes and produces a report within three business days. Because it starts from the client's own data layer, the report describes the buyer's account, not a case study.

The fourth is measurement. The ROAS yardstick is fixed as closed-deal value divided by ad spend, reported each period across the account's channels, so the same measure applies whether the buyer stays or leaves. The company's closed-loop marketing architecture passes qualified conversions back to the ad platforms, and the TTO funnel tuning agent names the leaking layer in graded priorities rather than filing a list of suggestions. A buyer who wants the same yardstick applied to a search-only brief can ask for it directly when choosing a sem agency, rather than taking the group-level score at face value.

Performance Ads packages that same discipline as a subscription: paid search and other biddable channels run against closed revenue, with media budget paid through the client's own accounts and a one-off integration build that connects the click to the close. Its 搜索引擎营销 service team runs Google, Yahoo/Bing and Baidu campaigns end to end, from account qualification and keyword research to landing pages and periodic reporting.

None of this makes the Wave's leaders worse at what they do. It gives a Singapore buyer a way to tell a specialist partner's claims apart: ask for the pricing sheet, the account ownership terms, the dated audit and the formula, and compare the answers side by side.

What should you do next?

Before your next shortlist call, run one test on each candidate: ask for a read-only look at your own Google Ads and GA4 data, with a dated report inside a week. The agencies that can do it will show you a funnel with named leaks. The ones that cannot will send a credentials deck instead.

For the Singapore side of that decision, the company's revenue tracking service for lead and conversion data sets out how a click is followed through to a closed deal, and the comparison of AI visibility against search rankings covers the measurement gap that now sits alongside traditional search reporting.

FAQ

Does the Forrester Wave tell me which agency to hire?

No. It scores the 12 biggest agency groups on 19 criteria and sorts them into tiers. Its value to an SME is the criteria list, which you can turn into questions for your own finalists, not the ranking itself.

Is a small independent agency a safer choice than a holding company?

Not automatically. The Wave found the biggest groups more alike after consolidation, and Forrester's analyst attributed at least one lower score to how recently a group had been operating at that level. The test is operating evidence in your account, whichever size of shop you talk to.

What is the difference between PPC and SEM?

PPC is the payment model: you pay per click. SEM is the broader discipline of buying search visibility, which usually includes paid search and can include shopping, local listings and the landing pages the ads point to. In practice, an SEM engagement is judged on what happens after the click, not on the cost per click alone.

Who owns the data if we leave an agency?

That depends on the contract, which is why it belongs in the questions. Ask for the account ownership and export terms in writing before signing, and check whether optimisation history and platform assets leave with you.

How quickly can we see whether an agency is any good?

Ask for a dated diagnostic on your own read-only data rather than a promise about future quarters. A concrete report from your account, delivered to a deadline, is the fastest honest signal available before you commit budget.

Sources

1. Michael Bürgi, "Media Buying Briefing: Forrester's Wave report finds growing homogeneity among the 12 biggest agencies", Digiday, 2026-11-09. https://digiday.com/media-buying/media-buying-briefing-forresters-wave-report-finds-growing-homogeneity-among-the-12-biggest-agencies/