How inefficient data analysis is costing agencies thousands of pounds a year

If you work at a PR or marketing agency, this will sound familiar.

You commission a research project. The results land, with spreadsheets and charts. Somewhere in all of that lies a great story.

Finding it, however, is where the real challenge begins.

According to our latest study at Sapio Research, this process is costing agencies far more than they might expect. Not just in time, but in lost opportunity.

The hidden cost of data overload

We surveyed 300 marketers across the UK and US and found that agencies are losing an average of £1,275 per research project purely due to inefficient data analysis. With most agencies running around seven projects a year, that adds up to nearly £9,000 annually.

It’s not that agencies don’t value research. Quite the opposite. Research underpins thought leadership, lead generation and creative campaigns. The issue lies in the way insights are delivered and accessed.

In a typical thought leadership project, almost a quarter of agency time is spent simply reading and interpreting research data. Teams spend an average of three days per project combing through statistics, with more than a third taking over four days.

As researchers, we see this regularly. Creative agencies are full of ideas, but those ideas are often slowed down by research outputs that are not easy to work with. Valuable stories remain buried in the numbers because extracting them takes too long.

Are agencies getting full value from research?

There is a clear gap between investment and impact.

Despite significant spending on market research, most admit they only use a fraction of the data they collect (58%).

That’s a huge missed opportunity.

Ideally, research should not exist to support a single press release or report. It should act as the backbone of a communications strategy, powering social content, email campaigns, sales materials and ongoing thought leadership.

That only works when insights are easy to extract, interpret and reuse.

Our research shows that when agencies gain faster access to insights, the benefits quickly multiply.

Respondents told us that improved efficiency would allow them to extend the lifespan of insights beyond 12 months, increase content output by 75% per campaign, and uncover deeper, more unexpected story angles.

When agencies feel confident exploring their data, everything else improves. Thinking becomes sharper, stories feel more authentic, and thought leadership becomes more distinctive.

Is AI the answer?

Ninety-two percent of agencies now use large language models (LLMs) in their thought leadership work, with half using ChatGPT. This appetite for efficiency is understandable, but it comes with risks. LLMs are known to produce errors, overgeneralisations and hallucinations, causing serious accuracy and security concerns.

And when agencies upload data tables into open AI tools, they risk compromising client confidentiality and reducing control over how their data is used.

Yet 44 percent of agencies are already using open-source LLMs to analyse research, even though these tools were not designed for that purpose.

At Sapio Research, we think it’s time for market research companies to provide secure, purpose-built AI workflows so creative teams can save time analysing data and focus on crafting memorable campaigns.