Advertising agencies sit on more sensitive access than most clients realize. A mid-level account manager routinely holds administrative rights to a client’s Google Ads and Meta Business Manager accounts, controls significant media budgets, and stores customer lists built for retargeting and CRM campaigns. Few vendor relationships grant this much reach with this little formal oversight, which is exactly where auditors, insurers, and clients are starting to look.
A System and Organization Controls (SOC) attestation, issued under standards set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), is becoming the mechanism agencies use to close that gap. A SOC 2 report tests an organization’s controls against the criteria of security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. For most agencies, security and confidentiality carry significant weight, since the primary exposure is unauthorized access rather than system uptime.
The report itself is only the output. What it measures is governance: whether the agency has defined who owns data security decisions, whether policies exist beyond a shared drive nobody revisits, and whether current controls are the product of a deliberate program rather than whatever AI suggested. An attestation without governance behind it reflects a moment, not a discipline, and it is the discipline that clients are ultimately trying to assess.
The Benefits of a SOC 2 Report
A SOC 2 report converts a trust claim into evidence, replacing “we take security seriously” with a tested, third-party-verified account of how access is granted, monitored, and revoked. It also shortens the sales cycle: enterprise clients increasingly build a completed report into vendor onboarding, cutting weeks of security questionnaires down to a single document. Just as important is what the preparation process itself uncovers. Agencies going through their first SOC 2 commonly find former employees with live platform access or vendor integrations that were never reviewed. These gaps are far better caught during a controlled assessment than during a breach. And building toward a report requires naming who is accountable for access reviews and incident response, a governance improvement independent of the attestation itself.
The Risks of Operating Without One
Without documented access controls, a compromised or retained credential can redirect ad spend or drain a media budget before anyone notices. A breach involving customer data creates liability for the agency and for the client whose customers were affected, often drawing regulatory attention under state privacy laws. Increasingly, the absence of a SOC 2 report is simply disqualifying in enterprise procurement; agencies without one may never learn they were eliminated from consideration. Without a governing policy, security decisions get made ad hoc by whichever account team happens to be paying attention, leaving the agency’s actual exposure dependent on who is on the account rather than on a consistent standard.
Attestation Without Governance Does Not Hold
A SOC report describes a period of time, but the controls behind it should be maintained year-round: a process for granting and revoking access, a policy for data retention, and a documented path for escalating a suspected incident. Agencies that build governance into how they operate, rather than treating it as an annual exercise, end up in a different position. Their attestation becomes a record of what they already do, and the same governance that supports the report also reduces the likelihood of the incidents it exists to prevent.
Is your ad agency preparing for an SOC report? Contact us to move forward with confidence.
By Kate Siegrist and Basha Snyder