Will Marketing Agencies be Relevant in 2025 and Beyond?

Tomorrow, I’ll speak to marketing agency leaders in Sao Paulo, Brazil, about the future of growth marketing. But let’s start with the hard truth: The traditional agency model is at risk. With rising acquisition costs, privacy restrictions limiting ad targeting, and companies shifting focus to retention and monetization, agencies that only optimize media buying will struggle to stay relevant.

Most of my presentations these days are for startups and established companies looking to drive growth from the inside—helping them build a strong foundation for activation, engagement, retention, and monetization. But this talk presented a different challenge: What would I do if I were running an agency today—especially one focused on customer acquisition?

Early in my career, I was a VP of Marketing focused on top-of-funnel acquisition—driving leads, optimizing paid campaigns, and working to scale growth. But over time, I realized that acquisition alone isn’t enough. The companies that truly scaled weren’t just great at acquisition; they were great at activation, retention, and expansion.

That’s why my core message for this audience is clear: Agencies that thrive in 2025 won’t just buy traffic for clients—they’ll help them maximize the value of every customer. Here’s how agencies must evolve to stay ahead.

1️⃣ Monetization & Retention Are Now More Important Than Acquisition

For years, marketing agencies have measured success by ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and new customer acquisition. But with rising Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and increasing privacy restrictions limiting ad targeting, the smartest companies are shifting focus to monetization and retention.

Winning brands today invest in:
✅ Net Revenue Retention (NRR) – Growing revenue from existing customers.
✅ Upsells, cross-sells, and subscriptions – Expanding customer lifetime value (LTV).
✅ Personalized retention strategies – Using first-party data to engage and re-engage customers.

📌 Example: Zoom vs. Join.me – How Monetization Strategy Defined the Winner
Zoom didn’t just acquire users with a great product—it had a superior monetization strategy that converted free users into paying customers at scale.

Unlike competitors like Join.me and Webex, which struggled to create a compelling reason to upgrade to their premium versions, Zoom’s freemium model created a clear, unavoidable upgrade path. By offering free unlimited 1:1 meetings but restricting group meetings to 40 minutes, they engineered a natural conversion trigger.

🔹 Why This Worked:
✅ The "40-Minute Rule" Created a Frictionless Free Experience—Until You Really Needed More

• For casual users, free 1:1 meetings worked perfectly.

• But the moment more than one guest joined, meetings were cut off at 40 minutes.

✅ This Made Free Users Look Unprofessional in Business Settings

• If an unexpected client or executive joined a free meeting, getting cut off mid-conversation was embarrassing.

• This nudged companies to upgrade before a key meeting, not after experiencing frustration.

✅ Seamless Upgrade Path → Frictionless Monetization

• No need to migrate tools—just upgrade instantly from free to paid.

• Result? Zoom maximized both adoption and conversion rates without disrupting the user experience.

💡 The Outcome:
While competitors struggled with low adoption and weak monetization, Zoom dominated the market. Today, Zoom owns the majority of the online meeting space, while Join.me and others failed to scale.

💡 For agencies: If you’re only optimizing media buying, you’re leaving money on the table. Helping clients improve monetization and retention creates sustainable, scalable growth.

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2️⃣ Retention Is Not Just a Marketing Problem—Agencies Can Drive It

Many agencies see retention as a product or customer success issue, but the best growth teams know that retention is a marketing problem too.

📌 How Agencies Can Help Clients Improve Retention:
✅ Optimize activation flows – Help clients get new users to value faster.
✅ Improve repeat purchase rates – Test lifecycle marketing campaigns and incentives.
✅ Leverage CRM & first-party data – Personalize customer engagement and reduce churn.

📌 Example: Ogilvy’s Reinvention
Even one of the most iconic advertising agencies in history recognized this shift. In 2024, Ogilvy restructured its business to move beyond acquisition, integrating customer experience, CRM, and loyalty services under the Ogilvy One brand. The result? New enterprise clients like Verizon and increased client retention.

💡 For agencies: The agencies that drive full-funnel growth—not just media buying—will be the ones that retain their own clients.

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3️⃣ Net Revenue Retention (NRR) Is the #1 Metric That Unlocks Paid Growth

NRR measures how much revenue a company retains and expands from existing customers—factoring in upsells, cross-sells, and churn.

📌 Why High NRR Unlocks Paid Growth:
✅ More expansion revenue → Higher customer lifetime value (LTV).
✅ Higher LTV → More budget flexibility for paid acquisition.
✅ Lower churn → Less dependency on constantly acquiring new customers.

📌 Example: Dropbox’s NRR-Driven Growth
When I led growth at Dropbox, we focused on activation, engagement, and referral—ensuring new users quickly experienced value, stayed engaged, and invited others. Our referral program became one of the most copied growth strategies in tech, inspiring similar programs across the industry.

While my focus at Dropbox was on activation, engagement, and referral, the company later introduced monetization strategies that led to a powerful Net Revenue Retention (NRR) engine. Paying customer cohorts didn’t just retain—they expanded, creating a negative revenue churn situation.

Combined with a strong viral referral engine, this allowed Dropbox to reach $1 billion in recurring revenue faster than any prior SaaS business—largely on organic growth.

💡 For agencies: Help clients measure NRR, not just ROAS. The brands that increase expansion revenue can afford to scale paid acquisition profitably—and those are the companies that will invest more in their agency partners.

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4️⃣ Experimentation Is the Secret Weapon for Sustained Growth

📌 Example: Amazon’s Growth Mentality
Jeff Bezos once said, "Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we run per year, per month, per day." Amazon didn’t scale by guessing—it systematically tested pricing models, product recommendations, customer engagement tactics, and every step of the customer journey.

📌 How Agencies Can Use Experimentation to Drive Growth:
✅ Move beyond A/B testing ad creative – Instead, partner with clients to test pricing models, retention offers, onboarding flows, and engagement strategies.
✅ Continuously experiment across the entire funnel – Acquisition is only as effective as what happens next. Agencies should help clients refine activation, retention, and monetization experiments to ensure paid media scales profitably.
✅ Develop a test-and-learn culture – The most successful agencies won’t just run experiments themselves; they’ll help clients embed experimentation into their company’s DNA.

💡 For agencies: Don’t just launch campaigns—help your clients build a culture of experimentation. The agencies that partner with brands on deeper-funnel testing will be the ones that unlock scalable, profitable growth.

📌 Why This Matters:
Paid media alone won’t drive sustainable growth. To truly scale, agencies must help clients improve activation, retention, and monetization through continuous experimentation.

Agencies that help clients develop a systematic testing process will not only improve campaign performance but also position themselves as indispensable business partners in revenue growth.

🚀 The bottom line: The agencies that invest in full-funnel experimentation will be the ones that scale paid media profitably and build long-term client relationships.

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🚀 The Agencies That Win in 2025 Will Be Growth Partners, Not Just Media Buyers

Here’s the shift agencies must make to stay ahead:

❌ Old Model:

• Run paid ads, optimize ROAS, drive traffic.

• Short-term client relationships based on acquisition performance.

✅ New Model:

• Help clients optimize retention, monetization, and expansion revenue.

• Focus on long-term client partnerships and sustainable growth.

What Should Agencies Do Next?

📌 Expand from just media buying to also include retention & monetization consulting.
📌 Advise clients to introduce a North Star Metric (NSM) to drive retention.
📌 Leverage first-party data & CRM for personalized customer engagement.
📌 Implement NRR as a core metric for growth.

💡 Final Thought:
The best agencies in 2025 won’t just bring in customers—they’ll help clients keep and grow them.

So here’s my challenge: What’s one change you can make today to help your clients not just acquire customers—but keep and grow them? Drop your thoughts below—I’d love to hear how your agency is adapting.