The Drum Recommends is a unique platform designed by The Drum to help brand marketers and other customers of agencies to provide honest feedback to advertising, digital and marketing agencies in order to create the best work in the industry. These ratings also help other potential agency customers from across the industry to find and select the very best agencies, based on unbiased ratings from actual clients.

The Drum is committed to ensure that all ratings submitted via recommendedagencies.com are genuine and trustworthy sources of information provided by real agency clients, therefore we apply a validation process using a combination of technology and our internal validation team. We ask you to help us maintain this honest and valuable information source for the industry.

We do not tolerate fraudulent ratings that are misleading, dishonest or biased from the agency or client that include:



Attempts by the agency to falsely boost ratings, scores and reputation including:

  • Submitting a review for an agency you own/employed by or any other companies financially linked to the agency.
  • Impersonating a client to submit a review.
  • Utilising any paid review company or third party to submit ratings.
  • Offering incentives (e.g. gifts or discounts) to encourage clients to only provide positive ratings.
  • Asking friends, relatives or anyone you have not provided digital or marketing services to in the last 2 years to provide positive ratings.


Attempts by the client to falsely damage or boost an agency’s reputation including:

  • Submitting a rating for an agency that you have not worked with in the last 2 years.
  • Submitting false rating scores or commentary to purposely boost or damage an agency’s reputation.
  • Submitting a rating for a company you work for or is financially linked to your company.


We also use the following criteria to validate each rating:

  • The email address used to submit the rating must be directly linked to the company and person providing the rating.
  • Clients must verify their rating via their email address when submitting a rating.
  • The person providing the rating must have just one live rating per agency at any one time (ratings can be renewed).
  • Ratings with abnormally high or abnormally low scores will be checked by a member of our team to validate.



We reserve the right to remove any ratings which do not comply with the above which may result in penalties.