Partnering for growth: How agencies win with modern consent management

For more than a decade, the digital marketing playbook was simple: more data and broader targeting drove reliable ROI, even as channels multiplied. Agencies powered this growth, delivering the right message at the right time to eager consumers still intrigued by basic digital experiences.

But that foundation is crumbling, because it relies on third-party cookies and consumer behavior that no longer exists.

The Changing Digital Landscape

In this new digital landscape, the number of brands, websites, and creators vying for an individual's attention is tenfold what it was even a few years ago. Consumers, with so many options, are now leveraging that reality to demand more personalization and elevated, more trustworthy experiences.

Likewise, the third-party cookies marketers traditionally used to track consumers are disappearing. Conscious of the number of analytics and marketing services used on modern sites today, more people are rejecting tracking, blocking pop-ups, and demanding greater privacy and transparency from brands. This coincides with regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act making mass data collection a liability rather than an asset.

The overall result? Traditional attribution models are breaking down, customer acquisition costs are rising, and return on ad spend is falling. The data marketers once relied on is increasingly incomplete, and for brands and the agencies that support them, proving campaign effectiveness and justifying spend has never been harder.

User Trust and the Future of Digital

For clients worried about reaching the right audiences and providing a personalized experience with their campaigns, agencies must deliver solutions that capture and retain both consented customers and data. Clinging to cookies and current consent practices won’t deliver sustainable success.

To adapt, companies need to rethink how they capture and use customer data. Instead of relying on third parties, they need to build direct, trusted relationships with their audiences powered by consent and preference data that fuels marketing, analytics, and personalization without breaking trust.

At Transcend, we see this inflection point as a chance to meet consumers where they are and deliver more trustworthy, memorable experiences. Sustainable growth comes from championing consent and powering first-party data strategies that build trust and enable responsible innovation.

Why Your Clients Will Love Transcend

For years, Transcend’s Consent and Preference Management platform has been serving as the data infrastructure for billions of user choices. From Fortune 500s to category leading brands like The Athletic, Patreon, Tonal, and Hims & Hers, we help organizations turn end user choices into more successful business outcomes.

Your clients are navigating a digital landscape where building user relationships comes first and driving campaign effectiveness is harder than ever. With Transcend, they can:

• Seamlessly capture and enforce customer preferences across every system in their stack to drive increased personalization for users
• Improve marketing performance with accurate, consented data flowing into CRMs, CDPs, analytics, and ad platforms.
• Build lasting trust through experiences that respect user choice without sacrificing usability.

Why Partner with Transcend

Partnering with Transcend gives agencies the data infrastructure to deliver digital transformations faster, from launching a website with built-in consent flows in days to rolling out compliant preference centers that immediately improve email engagement. Other benefits include:

• Faster rollout and fewer non-billable hours for delivery teams.
• Consent flows that keep project delivery timelines fast, predictable, and compliant.
• More streamlined implementation allowing agencies to unlock client wins and ROI faster than ever before.
• Dedicated resources along every step of the partner journey: partner management team, hands-on enablement resources, and implementation support when you need it to ensure delivery is always seamless.

Agencies that give clients the ability to effectively and compliantly capture and enforce customer consent and preferences unlock the power to activate that user data across marketing, product, and data systems. This fuels digital projects and improves key business metrics like CAC, LTV, engagement, and retention.

For your clients, this is a competitive advantage that powers growth in a trust-driven, privacy-first world. Ultimately, it positions your agency as a leader in modern digital experiences—one that works smarter and delivers tangible, repeatable results for clients.