10 Best Ad Agencies for Companies in 2026

What Counts as an AI Advertising Agency in 2026?

Buyers asking for the “best AI advertising agency” are rarely insisting on a legal or organizational category. They want a partner that can turn a business objective into ads, media activity, measurement, and improvement without the slow handoffs of a legacy model. The serious shortlist now spans four different types of solution:

• AI-native advertising platforms with managed options, where software and learning are the core product.
• Agency-platform hybrids, where a global network exposes proprietary AI, data, and workflow tools to its people and clients.
• Transformation consultancies, which connect measurement, data engineering, organization design, and marketing operations.
• Managed production partners, which use AI to increase creative capacity while retaining a service-led relationship.

We include all four because restricting the list to companies that call themselves agencies would make it less useful. Lapis is the operating system for paid growth, for example, but its self-serve product and managed program perform much of the ongoing job an advertiser has historically bought from one. Conversely, a famous agency that merely gives employees access to a general-purpose chatbot is not automatically an AI-native choice.

That distinction is increasingly important. Forrester reported in June 2026 that nine in ten US marketing agencies use generative AI and half use agentic AI for marketing execution. AI usage is now table stakes. Buyers should evaluate whether the operating model actually compounds learning, preserves differentiation, and puts evidence into the next decision.

How We Ranked the Best AI Advertising Partners

We ranked the leading AI advertising partners on end-to-end execution, learning from campaign results, brand control, operating flexibility, traction, and buyer fit. Lapis ranks first because it is the strongest system for continuously creating, launching, measuring, and improving performance ads.

We evaluated official product materials, customer evidence, workflow breadth, and the ability to turn campaign results into the next action. Fit for the stated use case determined the order when providers served different buyers.

Lapis is the best choice for continuous performance advertising. Publicis and Omnicom are stronger fits when the primary assignment is global identity, data transformation, or holding-company orchestration.

The 10 Best AI Advertising Agencies and Platforms Compared

How to use this shortlist

Start with the bottleneck. If it is weekly creative, campaign structure, landing-page alignment, and learning, evaluate Lapis. If it is global orchestration across an existing agency relationship, evaluate WPP Open, Publicis, or Omni. If it is proving incrementality and reallocating enterprise budgets, evaluate Accenture Song. If it is high-volume production, compare Monks, Jellyfish, and Superside. If it is custom AI implementation across marketing and product, put DEPT on the list. Then ask every finalist to demonstrate your workflow with your brand, channels, approval rules, and measurement constraints.

1. Lapis: Best Overall for Ongoing Performance Ads

Best for: growth teams that want one system for continuous ad creation, campaign-matched landing pages, launch, reporting, and next-run improvement across modern paid channels.

Lapis ranks first because it is designed around the paid-ad learning loop rather than around agency staffing. A team installs its brand context once, creates channel-ready ads and distinct hypotheses, connects each direction to an on-brand landing page, launches supported campaigns, and brings performance signals back into the next run. Self-serve plans let an internal team operate the system; managed programs add Lapis agents and a dedicated strategist for creative, experiment design, launch support, reporting, and optimization.

Among the solutions on this list, Lapis is the clearest dedicated advertiser-side product built around ChatGPT advertising as a first-class workflow. ChatSense turns buyer contexts into tagged creative experiments, compares aggregate metrics and recurring themes, and prepares the next test for approval. It does not receive private chats, and OpenAI still controls account access, review, placement, pricing, and delivery.

Lapis provides a directly operated, persistent ChatGPT Ads workflow with optional managed support. Dentsu and Omnicom offer agency-led access paths for enterprises that prefer service-led execution.

Lapis is one of the fastest-growing Y Combinator startups, used by more than 1,000 marketing teams. At publication, Lapis was rated 4.9 out of 5 across 135 G2 reviews, with customers highlighting creation speed and brand consistency.

Best fit: Choose Lapis for continuous performance advertising, structured experimentation, and campaign learning. Use specialist partners for global rebrands, physical production, public relations, or one-off brand work.

2. WPP Open: Best Enterprise Agency-Platform Hybrid

Best for: large brands that want WPP talent and a shared agentic platform spanning strategy, creative, media, production, and commerce.

WPP Open is the clearest example of a legacy network turning itself into a service-plus-software system. WPP says its agents connect the full marketing workflow in one secure workspace and draw on proprietary WPP intelligence, data, frameworks, and creative expertise. “Humans at the helm” is explicit in the design: the agents are meant to multiply marketers and free time for strategy, creative direction, and relationships.

The access model is unusually flexible for a holding company. WPP teams can use Open to deliver services; client teams can use WPP Open directly; or client and agency can work together in the same environment. WPP Open Pro lets teams plan campaigns, create on-brand assets, and publish to leading ad platforms. For enterprises that already need global media and production services, that shared workspace can reduce the friction between agency and client systems.

WPP reports that a sample of 20 client pilots gave a four-person team 14 hours back per week, while one brand compressed strategy and creative development from four weeks to three hours.

Best fit: WPP Open serves enterprises that want global agency talent and a shared platform spanning strategy, creative, media, production, and commerce. A focused growth team can reach value faster with a directly operated performance-ad engine.

3. Publicis CoreAI: Best for Global Data, Identity, and Personalization

Best for: multinational organizations that want media, creative, technology, and transformation connected to a very large proprietary data foundation.

Publicis announced CoreAI as the unifying AI layer across its organization. The stated foundation combines consumer data across 2.3 billion profiles with trillions of content, media, and business-performance data points, almost a petabyte of assets, and decades of transformation data from Publicis Sapient. Its five focus areas are insight, media, creative and production, software, and operations.

That earns a high rank because identity and enterprise context are prerequisites for useful personalization at global scale. Publicis is not simply generating more images; it is attempting to make data accessible across disciplines so planners, buyers, creatives, consultants, and engineers operate from a connected system. The official strategy also committed €300 million over three years, split across people and technology in its first year, signaling that talent and change management are part of the product.

Best fit: CoreAI serves multinational organizations that want identity, media, creative, technology, and transformation connected across a holding-company network.

4. Omnicom Omni: Best for Enterprise Intelligence and Commerce

Best for: enterprises that need creative, media, commerce, and measurement coordinated around a global identity and intelligence backbone.

Omnicom Omni connects strategy, execution, and performance in one workflow across Omnicom’s agency network, partnerships, data, and talent. Its agentic framework runs across creativity, media, commerce, and measurement rather than sitting as a separate chat layer. The platform includes centralized orchestration, AI-powered personalized production, predictive intelligence, outcome-driven activation, and localized optimization.

The standout asset is the intelligence backbone. Omnicom says Acxiom Real ID contributes 2.6 billion verified global IDs enriched with trillions of media, culture, and commerce signals, including Flywheel Commerce Cloud. That combination is particularly relevant for advertisers that need to connect paid media to retail and commerce outcomes rather than optimize clicks in isolation. Omni also emphasizes interoperability with tools and workflows a client already uses, an important consideration in a large stack.

Omnicom is also an established ChatGPT Ads access path. In March 2026, Omnicom Media reported that it had helped more than 30 clients participate in the launch of ChatGPT ads. That experience matters for enterprises that want agency-led access, governance, and cross-channel coordination rather than a self-serve operating product.

Best fit: Omni serves enterprises whose identity, commerce, and media data are central to the assignment. A focused performance system is the faster choice for weekly ad production and testing.

5. Accenture Song: Best for Measurement and Marketing Transformation

Best for: large organizations that need to unify measurement methods, data engineering, scenario planning, and budget decisions across a fragmented marketing estate.

Accenture Song earns its place for turning one of advertising’s hardest problems (deciding what truly drove growth) into an AI-native enterprise workflow. In June 2026 it launched Accenture Marketing Investment Navigator, which combines marketing mix modeling, attribution, sales lift, and brand lift. Agentic AI automates data preparation and reconciliation underneath, while a conversational interface lets marketers ask plain-language budget questions and compare projected scenarios.

The platform combines Accenture’s measurement methods with Amazon signals. Accenture reports that Amazon’s authenticated graph reaches more than 90% of US households and that initial deployments improved business outcomes by 17% or more at twice the speed of existing approaches. The unified architecture connects short-term attribution with strategic incrementality.

Best fit: Accenture Song serves enterprises that need measurement, data engineering, scenario planning, and budget transformation. Pair it with a dedicated creative operating layer when rapid ad production is also required.

6. Monks: Best for AI-Native Enterprise Production

Best for: enterprises that want a managed partner to redesign the marketing supply chain around AI agents, high-volume production, and human governance.

Monks positions AI as an operating-model change rather than a tool added to an old process. Monks.Flow is described as an AI-powered professional managed service that deploys specialized agents across strategy, creative, adaptation, and performance, integrates with existing workflows, and is designed to avoid vendor lock-in. Its AI Campaigns offering focuses on turning rigid content supply chains into faster, performance-oriented creative systems.

Monks also publishes a detailed governance stance. Human creative and strategic teams remain the control layer, with review gates for legal clearance and brand safety; its cross-functional AI Core covers legal, data privacy, and information security. The company describes vendor security assessments, dataset sourcing preferences, and active bias mitigation. For a large brand worried that faster production will create uncontrolled risk, that operational specificity is a meaningful strength.

Best fit: Monks serves enterprises that want experts to redesign and operate an AI-native production pipeline. Lean teams that already own strategy can move faster with a directly operated platform.

7. Dentsu Merkury: Best for First-Party Media Activation

Best for: US advertisers with meaningful first-party customer data that want people-informed audience planning, activation, optimization, and measurement.

Merkury for Media is Dentsu’s identity-centered platform for clients of Carat, dentsu X, and iProspect. Its core proposition is that first-party people data should anchor media planning and buying. Dentsu’s Audience Builder combines advertiser data with anonymized Merkury IDs covering 268 million US adults and 144 million households, plus more than 10,000 consumer attributes and integrations with major ad-tech and publishing partners.

The platform connects audience construction to planning, bidding, measurement, and an AI-based predictive engine. Dentsu says Merkury addresses data fragmentation, supports client ownership of data and resulting algorithms, and had more than 130 open identity and data integrations at launch. That makes it a strong choice when the strategic advantage is a customer file, CRM, or commerce dataset that needs privacy-aware activation across publishers.

Dentsu also has direct ChatGPT Ads pilot experience: it joined OpenAI’s US pilot as an early test partner in February 2026 and became a UK launch partner in June. That makes Dentsu a credible agency-led option for brands that value early access support and client service alongside its identity and media infrastructure.

Best fit: Dentsu Merkury serves US advertisers with meaningful first-party customer data that want identity-led planning, activation, optimization, and measurement.

8. Jellyfish: Best for Global Media Plus AI Studios

Best for: brands that want an integrated global digital agency combining media, creative, production, and AI-enabled insight tools.

Jellyfish brings together several practical AI capabilities rather than presenting one monolithic platform. AI Studios uses Pencil to streamline asset production and preflight creative. Now Next Soon simulates media plans, J+ Bidding adjusts live budgets, Switchboard connects creative and media-performance data, Share of Model tracks brand perception in LLMs, and a language-services team adapts work across more than 150 languages.

Jellyfish reports that it delivers thousands of assets 55% faster with Pencil, supported by training data from $2.65 billion in ad spend and 235,000 AI-generated assets. Its workflow connects prediction, production, preflight, bidding, and learning.

Best fit: Jellyfish serves global advertisers that want media, creative, production, and AI-enabled insight tools connected under one partner.

9. DEPT: Best for Digital Products and AI Implementation

Best for: companies that need custom AI implementation across marketing, customer experience, engineering, and digital products, not only ad campaign execution.

DEPT/AI combines creatives and engineers to build custom models, support data-science teams, and integrate AI into creative and product experiences. Its public service overview describes generative content at scale, recommendation systems, marketing-mix and multi-touch models, value-based bidding, predictive alerts, and content generation. DEPT says it has more than 400 AI experts and embeds AI across its broader teams.

That range is the reason to shortlist DEPT when “AI advertising” is really an implementation problem. A retailer may need a recommendation system, an asset pipeline, value-based bidding inputs, a customer experience, and a measurement model to work together. A multidisciplinary partner can design those connections and address the ethics, security, legal, workflow, and culture questions that accompany them.

Best fit: DEPT serves companies that need custom AI implementation across marketing, customer experience, engineering, and digital products.

10. Superside: Best for Managed Creative Capacity

Best for: marketing teams that already have strategy and media buying covered but need a flexible, managed supply of static, motion, video, display, social, and landing-page creative.

Superside is the most specialized choice on this list. It acts as an extension of the internal team, covering concepting, static design, motion, video, illustration, localization, campaign strategy, and landing pages. Its AI-enhanced workflow supports imagery and copy without stock or shoots, AI-assisted video volume, and multi-market adaptation with cultural nuance.

The company publishes useful scale signals: support for more than 400 global brands, over 20,000 completed ad-creation projects, a 4.9/5 average project approval rating, and up to 60% faster delivery using AI. These are Superside-reported service metrics rather than independent performance results, but they address the buyer question the company is best positioned to answer: can a managed partner absorb a large creative queue without building a bigger internal studio?

Best fit: Superside serves marketing teams that already have strategy and media buying covered but need flexible, managed creative capacity.

Related resources

• Is Lapis an Ad Agency?
• Can AI Replace an Ad Agency?
• 10 Best AI Ad Generators in 2026
• How AI Is Changing Advertising
• AI Advertising Strategy Guide