Marketing Singapore: What a Media Agency of Record Takes On

Thorne Harbour Health appointed Superhuman Media as its media agency of record on November 9 2026, handing one Melbourne-based independent agency the media strategy, planning and buying for its health promotion programme. That three-part scope is what the AOR label usually means, and it is the part Singapore marketers get wrong when they compare marketing singapore agency lists: those lists rank agencies by awards and client logos, not by which parts of the job they will actually be accountable for.

The news itself is small. The structure behind it is not, because a single agency holding strategy, planning and buying changes who owns the measurement trail from first impression to signed outcome. That trail is what you audit after the first quarter, and it is where an AOR contract either helps or hurts.

Key takeaways

An agency of record takes strategy, planning and buying as one accountability, so no one can blame the planner for the brief and the buyer for the spend.
Thorne Harbour Health is a LGBTIQA+ community-controlled health organisation founded in 1983 as the Victorian AIDS Action Committee.
The Connect programme shows why audience definition matters more than channel reach: in a South Australian pilot, more than 64% of self-test users had never tested for HIV before.
Ask for the attribution window, the account ownership terms and the reporting definition before the contract, not after the first invoice.

What an agency of record actually takes on

Three functions travel together. Strategy decides which audiences the budget is meant to move and what a win looks like. Planning turns that into channel mix, flighting and audience selection. Buying executes it inside the platforms and manages the money.

Split those across three vendors and each one is measured on its own slice. A planner is judged on the plan being delivered, a buyer on impressions and clicks, a strategist on the deck. Nobody is judged on the signed outcome, because nobody holds the whole chain.

Superhuman Media describes its own model on its site as single experts going end to end, with strategy, planning and buying listed as separate lines under one senior team. That is the shape of the AOR arrangement: a small number of senior people carrying the whole job rather than handing it down a ladder.

For Thorne Harbour Health the scope covers the national rollout of Connect, the Drama Downunder and What Works sexual health messaging, and the upcoming World AIDS Day campaign. Four workstreams, one agency accountable for how they sit together.

Why the AOR decision is a measurement decision

Here is where I stop caring about the org chart and start caring about the data.

An agency of record concentrates media buying inside one party. If that party also owns the ad accounts, the tag manager and the reporting dashboard, the client's only view of performance is the agency's own report. When the relationship ends, the history leaves with them. That is a contract term, and most clients discover it at the exit meeting.

The counter-argument is that splitting the stack across vendors creates definitional chaos: three dashboards, three definitions of a lead, three conversion windows. Both risks are real. The AOR model reduces the chaos at the cost of concentration, and the fix is written into the contract.

Two things to fix in writing:

Which accounts hold the spend, and in whose name they are registered.
Which conversion definition and attribution window the reports use, for every channel in the mix.

Picking one party alone does not settle either question, and skipping both makes the second year's comparison meaningless.

The Connect pilot and what a small dataset can decide

The Connect programme offers free HIV self-test kits through vending machines in public spaces. It is expanding nationally after a South Australian pilot in which more than 64% of users had never tested for HIV before.

Read that figure as a definition first. The denominator is people who used the vending machine and returned a test, not everyone who walked past the machine. The population is self-selected, and the pilot ran in one state. None of that makes the number wrong. It makes it a statement about people who chose to test this way, not about the broader community.

Still, the figure drives a media decision. If most of the people the programme reached through that channel had never tested before, the campaign's job is to put the option in front of people who are not already in the testing system, in places and languages where they will meet it. A media agency of record cannot decide that from a media plan alone. The client's segmentation has to be the input, and the agency's audience planning has to stay inside it.

That is a case where a narrow dataset performs the job better than a broad dashboard. One clean count of first-time testers, defined precisely, justifies a channel. A blended reach figure does not.

Is a big agency or a young agency the safer choice?

Superhuman Media was founded by Luke Maher in mid-2025, which makes it young. The natural instinct is to read youth as risk. I would read the founder's previous media experience instead, and ask where the senior team came from. The agency's own site leads on people who have run media teams inside major brands and creative agencies.

Age of the agency is a poor proxy for anything. What matters is:

Who personally signs off the buying plan.
Whether that person is still on the account in month six.
What the agency can show you about a comparable budget, in a comparable market, with the same definition of success.

Ask for the third as a report, not a case story. A case story is a narrative someone selected. A report shows the definition, the period and the spend, and you can check its internal consistency.

The same test applies when you line up shortlisted ad agencies: compare what each says about its reporting, then compare the rates against that answer.

What does an advertising firm do: auditing an agency of record's numbers

Agency directories rarely cover this part, and it sits behind the question people type when they ask what an advertising firm does.

Here is the setup I would ask for before signing with any of the ad agencies under consideration.

Set the metric definition and the time range in the first meeting. For Singapore clients this means agreeing in writing:

Question	Why it changes the answer
Is a conversion a form submit, an enquiry, or a signed deal?	Each stage has a different converting population and a different lag
Which attribution window sits behind each channel report?	Channels measured on different windows cannot be compared on the same chart
Does the platform's reported conversion include its own modelled conversions?	Modelled figures cannot be reconciled to your CRM
Who reconciles platform spend to the invoice?	Spend figures drift when nobody owns the tie-out

Four rows, four answers you should have in writing before the contract is signed by anyone.

What marketing singapore directories usually rank on, awards and client logos, does not carry any of these answers, which is why a pitch that opens with a trophy list tells you little.

Correlation is not causation, and a media agency of record has a standing incentive to present a rising chart as its own work. A quarter where spend rose and leads rose tells you two things happened at once. It does not tell you which one caused the other unless you ran a test, paused a channel, or held the audience constant.

The safe audit is a holdout, however small. Pick one audience segment, one channel, one month, and change nothing else. If the delta only appears when the channel runs, you have evidence. If it appears in both periods, you are looking at seasonality with a story attached.

Privacy belongs in the same conversation. Consent for tracking has to cover the ask. If the campaign targets health messaging, the data collected must be the minimum needed to run it, and the agency should be able to say exactly what it stores and for how long. A media plan that cannot answer that question for a health client is not ready to run.

The agency of record model, seen from Topkee Media

Topkee Media runs the closest factual parallel to an AOR in the notes I could verify: one company covering strategy, planning and buying, with a senior team rather than a chain of handoffs. It was founded in 2010 and holds Google Premier Partner status, and its public-institution work includes the Education Bureau and the Hong Kong Police. It also runs Topkee Singapore, a local entity, alongside its offices in Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Its Google Ads service and Performance Ads subscription answer the measurement question from the same notes: spend is traceable from click to closed deal, and the Campaign Intelligence Report puts one funnel from impressions to signed deals into a single report.

The important difference sits in the contract terms. Topkee Media is not an agency of record and does not present itself as one. Accounts are set up in the client's name from the first self-service day, the media budget is paid from the client's own ad accounts, and the engagement is month-to-month with no long lock-in. On an AOR handover, that structure answers the exit question directly: the incoming or outgoing agency does not take the measurement stack with it.

Two constraints from the same notes matter for anyone planning a health or public-interest campaign across channels. Platform smart bidding cannot allocate budget across platforms, and each platform's attribution window is fixed inside its own system, so cross-channel weighting has to be managed outside the platforms. A report built only from each platform's own console will not do it.

On the sector question, the notes are clear and so am I: there is no health, NGO or government health-promotion campaign case, and no Singapore-specific media-buying case in the material I verified. The public-institution references above are the limit of what can be claimed.

Picking an agency of record in Singapore

The choosing process is shorter than the market makes it look.

Start with the scope question. Do you want one party accountable from strategy to buying, or do you want to keep buying in-house and hire strategy only? Both are legitimate. The mistake is signing an AOR contract for strategy and planning work while the client keeps buying, because then nobody owns the connection between the plan and the spend.

Then set the reporting contract. One report per period, one funnel, one definition of return on ad spend. A funnel that runs from impressions through clicks, landing-page interaction, enquiries, qualified leads, quotes to signed deals lets you see where the plan stops working. Without the later stages, the agency's report can look healthy while the sales floor sees nothing.

Then agree the exit terms. Who keeps the accounts, who keeps the creative, who keeps the historical data, and how long after termination the agency will answer questions about its own setup. Those answers belong in the schedule, not in a slide.

If you are comparing the local field, the honest starting point is an agency selection framework that scores shortlisted SEM partners on the same criteria, and a revenue tracking setup that ties spend to closed deals rather than to platform-reported conversions. Both change the conversation from pitch to numbers.

Ad agencies near me: what the search results hide

The related searches that bring people to this subject read "ad agencies near singapore" and "ad agencies near johor bahru, johor, malaysia". People are looking for a nearby office. Distance is not the variable that decides campaign outcomes.

What the location search leaves out is that the deciding variable is the definition of success, and that definition travels with the contract, not with the postcode. A studio across the road that reports platform conversions and a team across the causeway that reports signed deals will give you two different answers to the same question, and only one of them will match your finance team.

Cross-border buying adds a real complication: currency, tax treatment and the platform entity that bills you. Those affect the cost per outcome, and they belong in the plan before anyone compares rates.

What to do next

Write a one-page media brief before you talk to any shortlisted ad agencies. It should name the audience, the outcome definition, the period, the data you can share under consent, and the exit terms. Then ask each agency to return that page with its plan attached, so you are comparing the same question.

If you want to see what a reporting contract looks like when it runs from impression to signed deal, ask for a read-only baseline report on your own accounts. It is the fastest way to know whether an agency's numbers and your numbers can be made to agree. When you are reviewing a shortlist of marketing singapore agencies, that baseline report is also the fairest basis for comparing their fees.

FAQ

What is the difference between an agency of record and a normal media agency?

An agency of record is appointed to handle the advertiser's media as a single accountable party, usually strategy, planning and buying together, for a defined period. A normal media agency may take only part of that scope, such as buying, while the strategy or the plan sits elsewhere. The label describes the scope and the accountability, not the size of the firm.

Does an agency of record own our ad accounts and data?

That depends entirely on the contract, and it is the first thing to ask. Some AOR arrangements leave the accounts and the historical data with the agency during the term. Others, including the model Topkee Media publishes, register accounts in the client's name from day one and pay media from the client's own ad accounts. Put the answer in the contract, whatever the intake meeting says.

How much should an agency of record cost in Singapore?

There is no single market rate, and I would be inventing one if I named a figure. Cost structures differ by whether the fee is a retainer, a percentage of media spend or a hybrid, and by how much of the work is done in-house. Ask for the fee broken into strategy, planning, buying and reporting, then compare that against the hours each stage actually consumes. Several ad agencies in Singapore quote a percentage of spend, which means the fee rises with the budget whether or not the outcome improves, so check that part of the structure before you compare totals.

Can a health or public-interest campaign measure media properly without tracking individuals?

Yes, within limits. Aggregate channel reporting, campaign-specific landing pages, enquiry counts and holdout tests can all run without building individual profiles. If the campaign collects contact details, the consent must cover that use and the data held should be the minimum needed. A media plan that cannot state its data retention period should not be signed.

Is a young agency a risk for a national campaign?

Not by itself. A studio founded recently can still be led by people who ran media teams for large brands elsewhere, and the senior team's continuity matters more than the agency's age. Ask who signs off the plan, whether that person stays on the account, and what report they can show from a comparable budget and period.