The Atlantic is getting smaller for B2B agencies
I’ve spent a lot of my career working with B2B agencies, particularly across the UK and US, and over the last couple of years I’ve noticed the relationship between those two markets beginning to change.
There has always been traffic across the Atlantic, of course. British agencies have been opening offices in New York for decades, often with varying degrees of success, and US agencies have long looked at London as their natural gateway into Europe.
But this feels slightly different.
I’m increasingly speaking to agency leaders who don’t really see the UK and US as two separate markets anymore. They might have been founded in London, Leeds or Manchester, but a significant proportion of their clients and revenues are now coming from North America. At the same time, I’m having more conversations with US agencies thinking seriously about the UK, whether that’s through hiring, acquisition, partnership or putting people on the ground.
You can see it happening across the market.
Fox Agency has been building its US presence through New York and Denver. ArmstrongB2B recently established a North American operation after US clients grew to more than 40% of its revenue. Transmission’s acquisition of Earnest created another significant B2B agency business spanning London and New York.
There are plenty of others, but the individual examples aren’t really the interesting bit. What’s more interesting is why this seems to be happening now.
Part of it, I suspect, is simply that B2B clients have become global faster than many of the agencies serving them.
A technology company might be headquartered in Boston, have its marketing leadership in London, sales teams across Europe and North America and customers scattered around the world. From the client’s perspective, the idea of having completely separate agency relationships in each geography increasingly makes less sense.
That creates a pretty interesting opportunity for independent agencies.
Not that long ago, international reach was one of the great advantages of the big agency networks. If you were an independent agency of 80 or 100 people in the UK, there was a ceiling on the kind of global brief you could credibly pitch for.
I’m not sure that ceiling exists in quite the same way anymore.
Technology has obviously played a part, as has the normalisation of distributed teams, but we’re also seeing a generation of agency leaders who are much more comfortable operating internationally. A relatively small independent agency can now have people in London, New York and perhaps somewhere on the West Coast, servicing clients across several continents without needing the infrastructure of a traditional global network.
Of course, putting a few people in New York or London doesn’t suddenly make you an international agency.
I’ve seen enough overseas expansion over the years to know that opening the office is usually the easy bit. Building the leadership team, transferring the culture, winning enough local business and creating one genuinely integrated company across two very different markets is much harder.
And that’s perhaps where this gets particularly interesting.
As B2B agencies become more international, the leadership challenge changes too. The person who successfully built a £10m UK agency isn’t automatically the person who can turn it into a £30m transatlantic business. Different markets, different commercial cultures, different expectations and increasingly different ways of attracting and retaining senior talent.
For some agencies the answer will be organic growth. Others will acquire. Some will find partners on the other side of the Atlantic and eventually come together. And I suspect we’ll see considerably more movement in both directions over the next few years.
What I’m less convinced about is whether we’ll continue talking about these businesses as “UK agencies expanding into America” or “US agencies entering Europe”.
We may simply be watching the emergence of a genuinely transatlantic B2B agency market.
If that’s where we’re heading, it could create one of the most interesting periods the sector has seen for some time.