Local vs. Remote Advertising Agencies: Which One Should You Choose?

Recent global events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, technological advancements, and financial and political shifts, have significantly changed the B2B sector, accelerating the adoption of remote work.

This shift has led many to assume that location no longer plays a decisive role when hiring an agency. Face-to-face meetings have been largely replaced by video calls, cloud tools, and instant messaging, removing physical distance as a barrier and enabling new opportunities for international collaborations.

While some studies suggest a tilt in favor of local agencies, the truth is that remote or outsourced agencies also have strong potential to deliver excellent results when managed effectively.

In this article, we explore how to choose between local and remote advertising agencies, what to consider at each stage of a campaign, and real-world examples that illustrate the benefits and trade-offs of each approach.

The Advantages of Hiring a Local Advertising Agency

Advertising is not limited to the creation of visual materials, SMM, or other creative campaigns, but also focuses on the way the message is created, what it wants to convey, and whether it fits the strategy, culture, and objectives of the brand. For an effective collaboration, the hired agency and the brand/company that hired the latter must be on the same wavelength regarding strategy and objectives, making alignment an indispensable factor for both from the start of the project.

Cultural context is necessary for understanding the local audience, language, values ​​and social norms in order to create the right marketing campaigns, avoiding the risk of misunderstanding, unethical or even offense. A fact to consider when hiring a local marketing agency is the ability to make decisions and adjust campaigns quickly, without delay. National or remote agencies offer greater resources and scalability for regional or global campaigns, but communication and adaptation to the local context can be slower.

Admittedly, the real value comes from the intersection between location and the expertise of the marketing company hired, and this denotes the fact that a local agency does not guarantee success if it does not have the necessary skills, but proximity helps to implement the strategy more efficiently. Let's see what these are:

Proximity Brings Benefits

Advantage	What it Means	How it Helps Your Business	Additional Insight
Faster Communication & Meetings	Quick meetings without time zone barriers	Immediate adjustments to campaigns and strategy; saves time	Ideal for businesses with dynamic processes or fast-moving projects
Better Understanding of Local Market Trends	Agency knows local culture, consumer behavior, and preferences	Campaigns and messaging are more relevant and resonate with the target audience	Helps avoid cultural mistakes and capitalize on local opportunities
Network & Connections	Access to local contacts: media, sponsors, influencers, and events	Enables exclusive partnerships, collaborations, and PR opportunities	Increases brand visibility in the community and builds credibility
Trust & Accountability	Physical presence and direct evaluation of the team and processes	Builds transparent, trustworthy relationships with the agency	Enhances accountability and reduces risk of misunderstandings
Flexibility for Face-to-Face Interaction	Ability to meet in person when needed	Facilitates brainstorming sessions, strategy meetings, and campaign reviews	Especially valuable for businesses that prefer in-person collaboration
Personalized Attention & Tailored Services	Smaller, local agencies can focus closely on your business	Strategies and campaigns can be customized to your specific market and needs	Local agencies often offer a more hands-on approach and faster feedback
Support for Local Community & Economy	Investing in local businesses and partnerships	Strengthens local presence and builds goodwill with customers	Can improve brand perception and community engagement

When Remote Agencies Make Sense

While local agencies offer proximity and easier collaboration at first glance, remote agencies may be the better choice in certain situations - especially when your advertising needs extend beyond local borders or require specialized skills. Remote or outsourced advertising agencies can be the better option in specific, well-defined situations.

Five Scenarios

1. When You Need Specialized Advertising Capabilities

The reality is that the talent pool is usually limited in certain industries, especially when it comes to niche services, which is why finding specialist agencies in your location often becomes a real challenge; the solution to this is outsourced (remote) advertising agencies.

Remote advertising agencies often build teams around specific advertising disciplines, such as:

• Performance & paid media (Google Ads, Meta, programmatic buying)

• Creative production for digital-first campaigns

• Multi-language or cross-market ad execution

• Advanced attribution and ad performance analytics

Because they are not restricted to a single location, remote agencies can assemble highly specialized advertising teams that may not exist in your local market.

In such a scenario, but also generally valid, it’s important to focus on the specialty, expertise, and professionalism of the company, rather than on where it is located.

2. When Cost Efficiency Matters More Than Physical Presence

Engaging an advertising partner from outside the region or country (remotely) where your business operates offers you the opportunity to analyze, balance, and select a company more pragmatically from a financial perspective, considering cost-effectiveness, according to the allowable budget and planned expenses.

Remote advertising agencies usually operate with:

• Lower office and operational overhead

• Leaner creative and media teams

• Flexible pricing models for campaigns and retainers

This allows companies to:

• Allocate more budget toward media spend rather than agency overhead

• Access senior advertising talent at more competitive rates

3. When Campaign Scale Exceeds Local Capabilities

The advertising solutions offered by local agencies can be truly reliable, but not if the company intends to expand its visibility and gain public interest in foreign markets.

To be more specific, for national, regional, or international advertising campaigns, local agencies may lack the scale required to manage:

• High-volume media buying

• Multi-platform campaign execution

• Large creative production cycles

• Real-time optimization and reporting

Remote advertising agencies are often structured to scale quickly, with:

• Dedicated media buying teams

• Automation and optimization tools

• Enterprise-level reporting systems

4. When Speed, Flexibility, and Continuous Execution Are Critical

Highly recommended for medium and large companies, but also valid for startups, which require complex marketing and advertising solutions but with rigorous deadlines, fixed KPIs, and clearly established and tactical objectives.

Outsourced or remote advertising agencies rely on digital collaboration workflows that allow:

• Rapid creative iterations

• Continuous media optimization

• Fast approvals and deployment cycles

Teams working across time zones can maintain near-continuous campaign execution, which is especially valuable during:

• Product launches

• Seasonal promotions

• Time-sensitive ad pushes

5. When Campaigns Are Not Dependent on Local Market Context

When advertising campaigns are built for scale rather than space, the physical location of the agency becomes much less important. This is evidenced by campaigns for e-commerce brands, SaaS products, mobile applications or national awareness, which are de facto driven primarily by data, testing and performance optimization, not by local market presence or proximity.

Local cultural nuance plays a smaller role than:

• Audience targeting

• Creative testing

• Conversion optimization

• Media efficiency

This scenario is about success and efficiency that depends on precise audience targeting, continuous creative testing, conversion rate improvement and effective media buying.

Outsourced or remote companies have a competitive advantage, being usually well-equipped for this type of work, and this is because their decisions are guided by real-time performance indicators, not by local relationships or geography.

How Remote Advertising Agencies Amplify Campaign Success

Stage of Advertising Campaign	Key Activities	Where Remote Agencies Excel	Why It Matters
Strategy	Audience research, campaign objectives, channel selection	✔️ Global expertise, access to niche industry insights	Remote agencies can bring specialized knowledge not always available locally, shaping smarter campaigns from the start.
Creative Production	Ad design, copywriting, multimedia content	✔️ Access to diverse creative talent	Distributed teams allow hiring the best specialists worldwide, increasing quality and innovation.
Media Buying	Selecting platforms, budgeting, scheduling	✔️ Advanced tools & multi-region reach	Remote agencies often leverage premium analytics and automation platforms, optimizing spend across multiple channels.
Optimization	A/B testing, performance monitoring, iterative improvements	✔️ Continuous, data-driven adjustments	With teams across time zones, campaigns can be optimized faster and around the clock.
Reporting & Analytics	ROI tracking, insights, campaign review	✔️ Enterprise-level reporting & analytics	Remote agencies provide sophisticated dashboards and actionable insights, ensuring performance transparency.

Hiring a remote or outsourced advertising company has the advantage of a wider range of options, considering that nearby agencies are often fewer and can limit your choices. Thus, the flexibility to choose from several options and also the diversity you find in it is truly valuable, and in such cases, IT company directories, such as TechBehemoths, come to your aid. By applying the appropriate filters (services, tech stack, industry, pricing, region, portfolio quality, etc.), you can find the advertising provider based on the criteria that matter most to you, without tying the choice to the actual location of the hired company.

Alternatively, you can contact the TechBehemoths team directly, placing the details necessary for your advertising work in Submit my Project to benefit from smart matching, where the team will manually connect you with the most suitable companies based on your request.

Case studies

Detailed, publicly verifiable examples of brand-to-agency collaborations are rare, due to confidentiality and sensitive business data, but these four cases, from diverse industries and brands with varying visibility, show how location and partnerships shape campaign impact.

IKEA Penang x BBH Singapore – Local Culture Integration (Malaysia)

IKEA launched a localized campaign for the opening of its Penang store, working with BBH Singapore to build a culturally-rooted creative direction based on the Hokkien dialect used in everyday speech in Penang. The campaign played with phonetic similarities between "IKEA" and local expressions, amplifying the cultural connection through outdoor media, print and social content, generating conversations and community affinity in a way that is impossible to replicate without local insight.

Actual results:

• Large organic social traction generated by the Hokkien wordplay concept

• Campaign featured as a successful cultural localization example in Marketing Interactive

• Strong engagement from the Penang community around launch communications

The campaign proved how cultural and linguistic nuance can strengthen brand connection, and how a partnership with a region-aware creative team can turn a standard retail opening into a culturally celebrated moment.

Bank of America x Local Agency Boston

Bank of America ran “The Human Sponsorship” campaign for the 2024 Boston Marathon, collaborating with OUTFRONT Media, a local OOH advertising and media planning partner in Boston. The local team executed over 300 out‑of‑home placements throughout the city, helping to highlight charity runners and drive community engagement, resulting in record fundraising and a Grand Prize at the OAAA Local Media Plan Awards.

Actual results:

• $71.9 million raised for 168 charities (+78.4% YoY);

• +5.7 points increase in brand favorability due to emotional connection with the local audience;

• The campaign won an OAAA award for creativity and local impact.

Collaborating with a local agency allowed Bank of America to deliver a culturally and contextually relevant message, with direct impact on the community and measurable results for the brand, demonstrating the clear advantages of a local team over a remote agency.

Premier Radiology x Outsourced Marketing (External Partner)

Premier Radiology turned to outsourced marketing services (SEO, PPC and digital strategy) through the O8 agency, with the aim of improving online visibility and lead generation.

Real-world results:

• +120% increase in organic traffic after SEO and content optimization.

• +75% increase in qualified lead generation.

• Improved positioning on relevant keywords and overall website performance.

This example demonstrates that a well-structured outsourcing model can lead to solid digital marketing performance, without the agency necessarily being local or in a specific geographic area.

Slack x Brand New School – Remote Creative Collaboration (Global)

Slack partnered with Brand New School, a creative and production agency, to develop “The Big Meeting”, a memorable, comedy‑style ad that illustrates Slack’s value in simplifying workplace communication. The campaign was built as a branded creative execution focusing on user insights, with production and creative strategy developed remotely through the agency partnership.

Real‑world impact:

• The campaign resonated widely in industry press and marketing channels, achieving significant organic reach and engagement across digital platforms.

• It helped reinforce Slack’s positioning as a productivity platform beyond just messaging.

Why it’s relevant:

This example shows that outsourced creative partnerships (with Brand New School), even when not tied to a specific geographic location, can produce widely recognized advertising work with strong engagement impact, illustrating the potential and value of remote agency collaborations.

Key Considerations When Choosing Agency Location

While digital collaboration tools enable working with agencies anywhere in the world, location can still influence the speed, quality, compliance, and cultural accuracy of your campaigns. However, the goal is not to pick a winner, but to evaluate which setup best aligns with your objectives, local presence or remote scalability.

Below is a clear comparison to guide decision-making:

Decision Factor	When a Local Agency Is a Strong Fit	When a Remote / Outsourced Agency Is a Strong Fit
Speed & Communication Rhythm	Best for projects needing rapid approvals, iterative sprints, daily sync, real-time feedback.	Works well for structured campaigns with clear deliverables and predefined timelines.
Cultural Understanding & Market Nuance	Ideal for campaigns requiring cultural tone adaptation, brand storytelling, or regional positioning.	Suitable for global messaging, scalable frameworks, and cross-market deployment.
Legal, Compliance & Data Privacy	Beneficial for GDPR-heavy industries (fintech, healthtech, gov-tech) or markets with strict data laws.	Efficient if the remote agency has proven compliance standards + secure workflow processes.
Technology Stack & Integration with Teams	Smooth collaboration with internal Growth/Product teams; easier onboarding into internal stacks.	Advantageous for advanced tooling, enterprise analytics, or access to niche ad-tech specialists.
Cost Structure & Resource Allocation	Makes sense for long-term partnerships with ongoing brand presence and local media relations.	Suitable when cost-efficiency and specialist access matter more than proximity.
Scaling & Market Expansion Needs	Fits regional launches or campaigns targeted to one primary market.	Fits multi-country rollouts, SaaS global expansion, multilingual campaigns.
Risk & Alignment	Lower risk of misinterpreting tone or local behavior; easier brand alignment.	Higher alignment risk if communication weak, but highly effective with structured project management.
Pricing	Tend to charge higher rates due to overhead and proximity: ~$100–$180/hr or $5,000–$15,000/month retainer.	Can be 30–60% cheaper depending on region and expertise: ~$40–$120/hr or $2,000–$8,000/month retainer.

Practical Insight for Your Business 2026

Smart tech companies evaluate which one they need more at each stage of growth – not which one is universally better. Local options are often limited by geography, while remote hiring allows you to evaluate hundreds of potential partners across different regions and expertise levels.

• Choose Local when you need speed, cultural fit, market-specific storytelling.

• Choose Remote when you need specialized talent, scalability, or global reach.

In many mature tech organizations, as well as in other industries, the most effective approach is hybrid collaboration, in which a local strategic core works alongside remote execution specialists.