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When BT switched its affiliate business last year, ending a longstanding relationship with DGM, it was no snap decision. A sales director, finance director and contracts director were all involved. For many businesses, specialist areas of digital marketing are no longer peripheral but critical. Hence the NMA Marketing Services Guide: a directory listing specialist service providers whose expertise can increasingly mean the difference between business success and failure.

This third edition has more entries than last year but its goal remains to catalogue and rank specialist providers whose focus is different to standard digital marketing agencies. These range from providers that focus exclusively on a particular discipline to those known to have an expertise. Our aim is to give budget-holders an overview of providers and their respective strengths. We hope you find it useful.

HOW THE GUIDE WAS COMPILED

We invited agencies to submit for entry in the Marketing Services Guide 2008 by selecting one of the following as their main area of business:

Ad networks Companies that resell ad inventory from a range of websites to other companies and agencies.
Affiliate networks Companies that develop and or run affiliate marketing campaigns and related services.
Analytics providers Specialists in helping companies measure their web marketing.
Email agencies Companies that develop or run email campaigns and related services.
Interactive TV agencies Companies that develop or run interactive TV or IPTV campaigns and related services.
Mobile agencies Companies that develop or run mobile campaigns and related services.
Search marketing (SEM) agencies Companies that develop search marketing campaigns, both natural and paid, and related services.

As with the NMA Top 100 Interactive guide, all the information in this guide was compiled by the agencies themselves, with details checked where necessary at Companies House. In each section, the companies provided full details of their UK turnover business split are ranked by the amount turnover they can attribute to the particular discipline in question. This year we have required that providers derive at least their business from a specialism in order included in that section.

In our ranking of search marketing agencies, we have accepted that turnover can include cost of media bought on behalf of clients short, all the invoices raised. Our understanding is that this interpretation conforms to accepted accounting practice and enables agencies to be ranked on a similar footing.

Companies that can’t split out a UK turnover figure for legal reasons due to their ownership are listed separately and also profiled. example, companies that are US-owned often unable to split out their UK turnover, citing the stringent requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Those companies entered but declined to provide turnover information are listed in the tables but not profiled

The one exception to this ranking methodology is the section on analytics providers. we’ve listed the companies alphabetically because so many are US-owned and therefor unable to provide separate UK turnover figures, citing Sarbanes-Oxley. Where turnover has been provided, this is given.

All turnover figures in this guide have signed off by companies’ financial directors. Every effort has been made to check facts, but ultimately they can only be as the information supplied by the companies themselves. We exclude revenue projections and only include figures for complete years. Because com panies work to different financial years, we include this information make comparisons more meaningful.