AGENCY PROFILE

NetzwerkReklame: A Digital Media Boutique Agency from Hamburg

In short NetzwerkReklame is an independent boutique media agency based in Hamburg. We plan and run integrated digital campaigns for national and international brands, across search, social, video, Connected TV, programmatic display, audio, podcasts and digital out-of-home. Founded in 2007 by Wolfgang Thomas, we are a team of 17 specialists and a Google Premium Partner (top 3 percent in Germany). German-speaking markets are our home turf, but English is daily working practice.

What we do

We help brands find and reach their customers through digital media. Not by selling a single channel, not by running templated campaigns, but by building media strategies that hold together across formats and platforms. Our home discipline is media planning. We extend it into adjacent questions of marketing wherever clients need a second opinion: product positioning, pricing logic, sales channels, creative direction, brand-building.

The way we work owes more to management consulting than to traditional advertising. Analytical, structured, evidence-led, and willing to push back when an idea does not stand up to scrutiny.

What makes us different

Plain-spoken digital marketing. Few industries enjoy cryptic acronyms more than ours: OTS, SOV, CPV, ROAS, VTR. Most of these terms can be explained in a single sentence. We see it as our job to walk clients through the territory rather than impress them with jargon. The name NetzwerkReklame, an old-fashioned German word for advertising, is itself a small joke against the buzzword reflex. The principle holds in English just as much.
Integrated by default. Digital marketing keeps multiplying: new ad formats, new platforms, new targeting options. At the same time, the digital brand presence has to align with whatever happens in retail, in classic media, in PR. We do not isolate disciplines. We design the channel mix from strategy, brand positioning and target group, not the other way around. Search, social, Connected TV, programmatic display, retail media, native, podcasts, digital audio, digital out-of-home: every channel is on the table, and the right combination is rarely the same twice.
Targeted, with discipline. The fact that almost everyone is online does not mean every campaign should reach everyone. The precision of digital targeting is one of its defining advantages over classic TV and print, and we treat it accordingly. Our planning starts with research-based personas built from market research data, with thousands of attributes per profile. AI helps us turn those datasets into actionable target groups. Dashboards keep the resulting campaigns transparent and steerable in real time.
Personal, not transactional. Digital marketing is technical by nature. That makes the human conversation more important, not less. Our 17 specialists span media strategy, campaign management, search, social, CTV, programmatic, analytics, and creative coordination. Clients work with named contacts, not with a ticketing system.

Who we work for

We currently serve around 40 clients across consumer goods, finance, food, automotive, watches, pharmaceuticals, hospitality and B2B markets. Long-standing relationships include Bergader, Bethmann Bank, Buhl Data (WISO Steuer), Tank & Rast, tesa and UNION Glashütte, among others.

Some clients work with us in German only. Others are international teams headquartered in Germany who have chosen English as their internal working language. English-language briefings, plans and reporting are part of our daily routine.

How we work across borders

Hamburg is our base, and the German-speaking market is the one we know best. But digital marketing is unusually well-suited to cross-border work. The most-used platforms in almost every market – Google, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon – are global by design and rank in the top 20 of most national digital landscapes. The planning logic on these platforms travels well. The local nuance does not, and we are honest about that: a good local agency will always know its home market better than we do.

What we offer instead is a different value proposition. For many international campaigns, working with a single experienced partner in Germany is more efficient and more coherent than coordinating a patchwork of local agencies. Learnings move faster within one team. Reporting stays consistent. Budgets do not disappear into agency-management overhead.

We have run campaigns across Western and Eastern Europe, the Nordics, the UK, and occasionally further afield, most recently a near-global campaign reaching most countries worldwide (with around ten markets excluded for sanctions-related reasons). We also frequently advise our clients‘ international clients on building out their e-commerce presence in new markets. Whether one partner in Hamburg is the right setup for any given project, or whether a local agency network would serve better, is a conversation we have early and openly.

Partnerships and tools

We are a Google Premium Partner (top 3 percent of agencies in Germany), a Microsoft Advertising Partner, and an Amazon Verified Partner. We are deliberately platform-neutral in our recommendations. Among the tools we work with day to day are Civey for market research, Neurons for AI-based creative pre-testing, Sistrix for SEO, Funnel.io for data warehousing across more than 600 data sources, and Data Studio for client-facing dashboards. The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP and Hawk DSP are our preferred demand-side platforms for programmatic campaigns.