British performance marketing agency Impression has today opened an office in New York, marking the company's first move outside the United Kingdom and securing its first two American clients: luxury holiday club operator Exclusive Resorts and financial seminars marketing firm AcquireUp.

The announcement, made on 14 May 2026, positions the 120-person agency - founded in Nottingham in 2012 - as a transatlantic operation for the first time in its 14-year history. The New York base adds a fourth location to the agency's existing offices in Nottingham, London, and Manchester.

Background and growth trajectory

Impression has built its reputation around what it calls an "Evidence into Action" proposition, combining data analysis, experimentation, and proprietary tools to deliver measurable outcomes for clients. According to the company, 2025 was its strongest financial year to date, with turnover growing 27% compared to the prior financial year. The same year also brought a third consecutive win in the "Europe's Large Paid Media Agency of the Year" category - a title the agency has now held for three consecutive years spanning 2023, 2024, and 2025.

That combination of financial momentum and award recognition appears to have underpinned the decision to make the transatlantic move. The agency's UK client roster already includes Stella McCartney, DHL, Milwaukee, and Clarins. Adding US clients in New York represents a new chapter in geographic reach rather than a shift in the type of work the agency pursues.

The broader UK digital marketing landscape has shown strong conditions for agencies seeking to expand. UK digital advertising expenditure is forecast to reach £45 billion by 2026, according to IAB UK data, growing at a consistent 10% year-on-year rate. Meanwhile, research from Impression itself published in December 2025 found that 77% of UK marketing professionals expected revenue growth in 2026, though that same survey recorded integration challenges as the dominant operational difficulty across teams.

The two US clients

The two inaugural American engagements cover distinct areas of performance marketing and reflect different strategic needs.

Exclusive Resorts operates as a luxury destination club, offering members access to private residences at high-end locations. The partnership with Impression is focused on organic SEO, with the agency tasked with improving the brand's search visibility to reach high-net-worth audiences. According to Ben Walker, SEO Manager at Exclusive Resorts: "We wanted to find an agency that had a clear understanding of our business and our membership pool to drive organic commercial success. We were really impressed with Impression Digital's detailed SEO strategy and high level of collaboration, and we're super excited to see what we can achieve together."

The SEO brief is notable given how pressured organic search has become for high-value audiences. AI Overviews have been linked to significant reductions in organic click-through rates for publishers, and the challenge of maintaining organic visibility in a search landscape where AI-generated summaries increasingly sit above traditional blue links is one that Impression's travel and tourism research has directly addressed. A sector report published by Impression in March 2026 found that 67% of UK travel marketers had seen a positive impact on organic traffic from AI search - a finding that cuts against the broader pessimism in the industry around AI-driven click declines.

AcquireUp, a financial seminars marketing firm, has a different remit. According to the announcement, AcquireUp has engaged Impression to assess and refine its marketing strategies by identifying additional channels and integrating AI-driven creative optimisation. Glenn Kawasaki, Executive Vice President at AcquireUp, described the rationale: "Impression's forward-thinking perspective combined with their platform expertise and commitment to actionable data-backed recommendations will ensure we're continuously evolving how we engage our audience. They stood out as a partner who can both challenge and support our strategy - helping us build a more connected, scalable and performance-driven marketing approach."

The AI-driven creative optimisation element of the AcquireUp brief places Impression in a growing segment of the market. Research published in April 2026 found that 89.2% of marketers consider creative important for optimising campaign performance, yet only 3.6% actively optimise it in a systematic way. Agencies that can close that gap - using structured testing and AI tooling to make creative performance as measurable as media performance - are increasingly valuable to clients.

What the US expansion means in practice

For Mikey Emery, Chief Commercial Officer at Impression, the move represents a deliberate strategic bet on the value of structured evidence-based marketing in a market known for speed and complexity. According to Emery: "Launching in the USA is a pivotal milestone in our growth journey that has been fuelled by the momentum of recent client wins with two such great stateside businesses like Exclusive Resorts and AcquireUp. We are here to bring our 'Evidence into Action' proposition to life for US brands, because in a market this fast-paced, the challenge isn't lack of data - it's the speed at which you turn that data into competitive advantage. Our mission is to help clients transform complex insights into clear, commercial strategies that drive long-term impact."

The framing is specific to the US market context. Unlike the UK, where Impression has operated for over a decade and built up institutional knowledge across sectors, the American market requires the agency to establish credibility from scratch. The New York location is a deliberate choice - the city remains the centre of gravity for major brand marketing budgets and the agency relationships that surround them. Having two named client wins at launch provides concrete proof points rather than aspirational positioning.

Impression describes itself as a certified B Corp with more than 100 industry awards across performance, campaigns, and culture. The B Corp status signals a commitment to social and environmental accountability standards that some US clients, particularly in luxury and financial services, may find relevant to their own corporate values programmes.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For advertisers and agencies watching the UK-to-US agency expansion pattern, the Impression announcement offers several data points worth examining. The agency is entering the US market with a performance-first positioning rather than a creative or brand-led one, which aligns with where US marketers have been concentrating budget attention.

PPC Land has tracked the broader shift in digital advertising from impression-based metrics toward measurable business outcomes, a structural change that is particularly relevant to performance marketing agencies. Clients are asking harder questions about what their agency spend is actually producing, and agencies that can demonstrate commercial outcomes rather than channel activity are better positioned to win and retain relationships.

The AI angle in the AcquireUp brief is also significant in context. AI-driven creative optimisation has become a competitive differentiator in performance marketing, with platforms like Amazon, Meta, and independent ad tech providers all building automated creative testing and selection tools. Agencies that can layer their own methodology and experimentation frameworks on top of these tools - rather than simply activating them at default settings - are selling a different product. The Impression approach, which its own survey research suggests prioritises data analysis and strategic clarity over pure automation, positions the agency on that more considered end of the spectrum.

The US market is also considerably more competitive for independent performance agencies than the UK. American marketers are served by a dense ecosystem of specialist agencies, large holding company networks, and platform-native consultancies. Carving out space requires either a distinctive capability that US agencies do not widely offer, a lower price point, or a segment focus. Impression's initial client selection - luxury hospitality and financial education - suggests the agency may be targeting categories where bespoke strategy and deep audience understanding carry more weight than pure media scale.

Impression's own survey of UK marketers, published in December 2025, found that 26% of respondents identified SEO as their anticipated biggest revenue driver for 2026, placing it alongside email, content, and influencer marketing as the top cited channels. That finding is consistent with the agency's decision to anchor its first US client relationship in organic search strategy - a discipline where the gap between sophisticated execution and generic agency work remains wide, particularly as AI search reshapes how audiences discover premium products and services.

The financial seminars sector, where AcquireUp operates, faces its own specific digital marketing challenges. Financial services marketing is subject to regulatory requirements around claims and disclosures, which means that generic AI-generated creative can create compliance risks as well as performance risks. An agency that brings structured creative testing with compliance awareness to the channel identification and creative optimisation brief has a more defensible offer than one selling pure automation.

Agency internationalisation in context

UK agency expansion to the United States has a long but uneven history. Large holding companies built their transatlantic presence through acquisition, while mid-size independents have frequently found the US market more difficult to crack than anticipated. The challenges include client relationship norms that differ from UK practices, procurement processes at large US corporations that can disadvantage smaller agencies, and a talent market in cities like New York that operates at significantly higher cost than UK equivalents.

Impression's approach - opening with two named clients already secured rather than announcing an intention to find US business - reduces one of the typical risks of the pattern. The agency has not opened a speculative office; it has opened with a client base already in place. Whether that base will grow quickly enough to make the New York office commercially self-sustaining will depend on the agency's ability to generate referrals and new business from within the American market rather than transferring UK client relationships.

The agency's B Corp certification and its track record of research publication - the 2026 Marketing Landscape and the Travel and Tourism Landscape surveys among them - give Impression a content marketing and thought leadership infrastructure that can support US market awareness-building without requiring large above-the-line investment. Research-led positioning has become a standard agency marketing approach, but the Impression surveys cover UK data rather than US market conditions, which limits their direct utility for American prospects. Building US-relevant research assets will likely become part of the agency's medium-term development plan.

At 120-plus employees across four offices, Impression is not a small agency by UK independent standards, but it is significantly smaller than the holding company networks that dominate large US client budgets. The agency's positioning against market challengers and industry leaders - its own language - suggests an acknowledgment that the most accessible US client segment is companies actively looking to displace incumbents rather than those with long-standing relationships with WPP or Publicis agencies. That challenger orientation may prove to be a genuine advantage in a market where dissatisfaction with large-agency bureaucracy is a recurring theme among brand marketers.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Impression, a British performance marketing agency with more than 120 employees and offices in Nottingham, London, Manchester, and now New York. The agency was founded in 2012 and holds B Corp certification. Key figures cited include Mikey Emery (Chief Commercial Officer), Ben Walker (SEO Manager at Exclusive Resorts), and Glenn Kawasaki (Executive Vice President at AcquireUp).

What: Impression today opened a New York office - its first outside the UK - and announced two inaugural US clients: Exclusive Resorts, a luxury holiday club operator, and AcquireUp, a financial seminars marketing firm. The Exclusive Resorts engagement focuses on organic SEO for high-net-worth audiences. The AcquireUp engagement covers channel identification and AI-driven creative optimisation.

When: The announcement was made on 14 May 2026. The expansion follows a financial year in which Impression recorded 27% turnover growth and secured a third consecutive "Europe's Large Paid Media Agency of the Year" title for 2023-2025.

Where: The new office is in New York City. The agency's existing UK offices are in Nottingham (headquarters), London, and Manchester.

Why: Impression is extending its "Evidence into Action" data and performance marketing model into the US market, citing both sustained UK growth and the opportunity to apply its methodology in a larger, fast-moving advertising market. The agency positions the challenge in US marketing not as a lack of data but as the speed at which organisations convert data into commercial strategy.

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