Read to the end for some fun numbers and stats

I’ve always been inspired by Defector’s yearly financial reports (they posted their latest update a few weeks ago). As an indie publication, they have no responsibility to do a yearly financial update, which is why I love it so much. It 1) keeps people rooting for their success, while 2) inspiring and educating others who might want to follow in their footsteps, even competitors. 

I think the former is worth the risk of the latter, and I take a similarly abundant view of the agency landscape—let a thousand small agencies bloom, Codeword will thrive in that world. So I’ve been putting together my own learnings from the past year, and some guesses for next. If they help you run your agency, great. If they inspire you to open a shop of your own, amazing. If they just keep you rooting for Codeword’s success, then it’s well worth it. 

Also, I tried my best to keep this short. (I failed, but I tried my best.)

The Business Landscape, and Our Place In It

Let’s start with the obvious: Ad agency economics are a dumpster fire, and have been since… 2022? 2008? 2001? The canaries in the coal mines are all dead; the bellwether agencies are now single-client shops, or changed their name, or were subsumed by some private equity firm. The IPG/Omnicom deal is a disaster. More on that in a second. And WPP is rumored to be in acquisition talks with Havas? Or maybe not? 

Codeword is somewhat removed from the big holding companies because we don’t make ads, but we compete in the same economic landscape. We fight the holding cos for clients, for budget, for talent, and for oxygen in the trade press. So here’s how we’re going to keep fighting (and hopefully keep winning) in 2026. 

• Approach the fight like the pirates we are. We win because we move fast, and we look for easy wins that play to our advantages instead of fair fights. That’s always been our way, but we’re going to be more direct and intentional about it in 2026. 
• And the “navies” we’re up against are… not having an easy time. Like I mentioned, the IPG/Omnicom deal is a disaster for our industry, and I’d be very interested to hear what holding co. clients think about all the downsizing and offshoring their agency partners are doing. Because it looks to me like Enshittification 101, which means unhappy clients, which means opportunities for Codeword. 
• We continue to believe that small and mid-size shops can offer a better level of support, bolder creative, and more continuity and specialization than a holding company. For two reasons: 
  • We are beholden to our clients and their needs, not to shareholders who expect us to maximize short-term profits. That’s a difference clients can feel, and we’ll be going right at this with our marketing. (In fact we’ve already begun!)
  • Maximizing profits means making and running ads, which means high costs for the clients, and high margins for the agency. We now have years of data showing that audiences don’t want the kinds of ads that pay the bills for the holding companies. They want content experiences, culturally impactful social campaigns, creator partnerships, scrappy stunts. The kind of marketing that’s high-expertise and low-margin, and therefore a bad fit for a big-agency model. I think this mismatch explains a lot of the tensions in our industry right now. 
• Codeword talks about being an “indie,” and we are in spirit though not in fact. Codeword joined We. Communications 7 years ago. In our minds, we can get away with the indie label because We. wants Codeword to keep being Codeword, and We. itself is very much an indie. In an age of holding company consolidation, We.’s founder, Melissa, continues to put her employees and her clients first, and resist the siren call of acquisition. When you see me talk about Codeword’s “independence,” it’s not a smokescreen. We feel quite independent, and our clients enjoy all the benefits of working with a partner that acts as an indie.  

The Tech Landscape, and Our Place in It

This has been a very weird year for the tech industry, as tech and politics collide in novel ways. We continue to be tech optimists (I don’t think we could do good work without being optimists), but at the same time, we’ve had to put much more thought into our ethical stances and where we draw lines for ourselves. 

Our client stance has always been “we don’t work with companies that make the world worse,” and that continues to be the bright line that we simply won’t cross. It’s kept us out of some industries, and that’s good and healthy. And lately we’ve had to approach VC relationships, AI technologies, and startup clients a lot more thoughtfully. Those are industries where we have lots and lots of experience and relationships, but you know, we need to do our work without helping tech bro fascists undermine our society or our democracy. Just saying. If you think that’s an overreaction, you haven’t been paying attention. 

Anyway, it’s a weird time for the tech industry, but we’ll get through it. I’m excited for the future, and I’m proud of our client roster, the work we’ve said yes to, and more importantly the work we’ve said no to.

Some Highlights and Learnings from 2025

• Our biggest move in 2025: We elevated Gabie Kur to partner at the beginning of the year. It’s been great for us: She continues to be one of our best team builders, she has a nose for new business, excellent instincts, and fiercely loyal clients. And she pushes me to do my job better, which IMO is the sign of a healthy partnership. 
• 2024 was The Churn Year, including a rough holiday season last year where we said goodbye to a big long-term client of over a decade, which meant saying goodbye to a handful of talented people. The math required it—when client revenue dips, our salary load has to respond quickly—but it sucked for everyone involved, and the loss of good people still stings a year later. 
• Coming out of that, 2025 has been a year of steady growth, and we feel very confident heading into 2026. 
• We’ve added a couple big global client logos in new industries for us, specifically insurance and consumer credit cards. This is awesome for lots of reasons, but my favorite is that we continue to gain momentum in tech-adjacent industries.  We’re getting more and more clients who aren’t tech companies but want to act and move like them.
• Thanks to excellent work from across our team, client retention is quite good, especially for such a tumultuous time in our industry. We’re also getting good organic growth and scope expansions, mostly pirated away from our clients’ big-agency remits. Winning work is fun. Stealing work is delicious. 
• After years of minimizing our freelance support, this year we started leaning more on super experienced friends and freelancers for project work. And btw, we treat them great. Codeword has always believed that paying freelancers quickly is good karma, good marketing, and good for access to talent. And it’s paying off with freelancer love, like this note someone posted a couple weeks ago on LinkedIn. 🥰🥰🥰
  • “The best client I have had in recent years was Codeword—their leadership made time to communicate how much they valued us freelancers and that paying on time was important to them. True class acts!”  
• Our speechwriting and exec comms work continues to grow. This is a skill that not many agencies can offer, and it generally doesn’t make sense for clients to develop the practice in-house. We’ve really leaned in here by hiring top-tier specialists, and growing our own. It’s hard work but it’s fun, and I love getting my own hands dirty with these clients. 
• AI visibility has taken off as A Thing Clients Care About. We have some expertise here, and we’re advising clients on how to take advantage. That said, we’re on the fence about becoming an AI-visibility shop, for the same reason we stayed out of SEO and traditional content marketing during the boom years of those industries. Too performance-driven, too far down the funnel, lots of competition for work that only really pays off at scale. So we’re treating AI visibility work as “a thing we do,” but not “who we are.” I’m confident that’s the right approach but we’ll see. 
• Speaking of AI… we’re doing incredible client work in this space. And we’re trying to stay on the cutting edge of the industry, with new guidelines, internal comms, and a partnership with 99Ravens to augment our custom AI stack. And we’re continuing to be seen as thought-leaders in this space, with trade coverage here, here, here, and lots of other places. 
• On the marketing side, we’ve been trying our hand at Codeword ad campaigns for the first time. Small targeted buys and media partnerships while we get our feet under us, and we’ll go bigger in 2026. We believe there are smart ways to market ourselves without falling into the same ol’ outbound sales ruts and money pits. If you have “digital,” “marketing,” or “comms” in your job title, we’re coming after you!
• We’ve been doing some bigger stuff, too, like our first large-scale partnership with Adweek for the F1 Grand Prix in Las Vegas. And we’ve been doing lots of smaller investments in events and conferences, including Cannes, Money 20/20, others. We’ve also hosted an executive dinner series in NYC and SF that has been well-received and led directly to client opportunities. 
• PR continues to be a key offering for us, and we’ve continued to get in with bigger brands and bigger scopes. For most of Codeword’s existence, our PR team was servicing early-to-mid-stage startups and VCs. We love all of our clients, but working with startups is its own beast. Historically, we overserviced pretty much every startup client, and that’s before we factored in the startups that simply didn’t pay their bills. It’s a tough game, which is why we’re happy to leave it to other agencies to figure out, and why we’ve spent the past 5 years intentionally investing in our team so we can level up our clients. That’s been a big success for us, with global, publicly-traded brands now on our PR roster. We’re in a sweet spot where we can service fast-moving innovation brands better than bigger agencies, and more mature businesses better than smaller agencies. It took a long time and a lot of work to get here, and it’s a great place to be!

What to Expect from the Pirates at Codeword Next Yarrrr Year

Firstly, we’re reloading our creative leadership. Our head of creative left in July on friendly terms, and I’ve had to step back into that role, while also working with our recruiting team to manage an applicant pool of 3.5 zillion candidates. It was literally, figuratively, emotionally, and professionally overwhelming. There’s SO MUCH great talent out there right now. I met with more than a dozen candidates that would’ve been great for us, but we’re very very excited about where we ended up, and we’ll have an announcement to make in a few weeks. 

Our biggest challenge to solve next year is the tension underlying every new brief, and every creative pitch, and every awards show: “we don’t know what the world looks like anymore.” The way people get information has evolved (or perhaps devolved), and our industry has fallen behind. Codeword hasn’t cracked The Grand Unified Field Theory of Post-Modern Marketing yet, but I suspect we will, and that it’s hiding within our intersection of comms, content, and community. 

There are a few forces pulling at us right now: 

• New algos and incentives are killing “social” media as we’ve known it 
• Traditional media continues to deteriorate, so PR needs to get back into “public relations” instead of “media relations” 
• A Google-Zero world changes how and why people create content on the web 
• Communities are thriving in spaces like Discord where brands can’t reach them 

And there are plenty of positives which point to a bright future for Codeword’s approach: 

• People will always need information about brands and products 
• People will always want to hear from people and brands they trust 
• People will always make time for their personal and professional interests

All that to say, the information landscape is shifting in ways that the industry has not fully acknowledged. Which gives Codeword a huge opportunity to act on these changes in service of our clients, before our/their competitors do. That’s what we’re most excited about for next year. We hope it’s a great one for you, for us, and for the world. 

Thanks as always for being part of the Codeword community, rooting for us, and reading our long blog posts. And now, as promised, a quantitative recap of the year…

2025 By the Numbers

• Emails received: Over 1 million
  • WEEKEND emails received: 34,000 (mostly newsletters, thank you clients!)
• Exec speeches written: 51
• For a single client’s internal comms program:
  • 1,400 help center updates
  • 1,300 article overhauls
• Babies born: Arthur, Chloe, Imogen, Jackson, John, Julian, Sophia, Wells
  • Total days of parental leave: 750
• Press hits for clients: 1,842
• Press mentions for Codeword: 47
• Codeword parties: 16 
• Resumes received: 8,217 (and counting…)
  • Recruiters to go through all those resumes: 1
• Docs, decks, and spreadsheets created: 14,586
• Fantasy Football champions: 1 (Scott Russell, but I’m coming for him)