About
A straight answer to “who should we talk to?”
Ottawa has a deep bench of agencies — brand shops, digital teams, public affairs firms, bilingual studios that have been doing federal work for decades. Almost none of that is visible to someone starting a search. What is visible is whoever bought the top ad slot.
Ottawa Agencies is the list we wanted to exist, plus the brief-writing tool that makes a shortlist worth having.
What we hold ourselves to
One region, properly covered
The directory covers the Ottawa–Gatineau region only. A national list would be longer and less useful; the point is that everyone here is someone you could sit down with.
Listings are researched, not sold
Agencies are added because they work here, not because they applied or paid. Nobody can buy a position, a badge, or a place near the top of a filter. The site carries Google ads to cover its costs; they're labelled, kept apart from the listings, have no effect on who appears or where, and are covered in the privacy policy.
No ratings, no scores, no star counts
We don't publish rankings we can't defend. Filters describe what an agency does; judging whether they're good at it is your job, and the RFP is how you do it.
We list the agency that runs this, and we say so
Marcus and Muse operates the directory and appears in it, listed first in the disciplines it works in. Its profile says so. Nobody else can buy that position or any other: every other listing appears in a random order that changes regularly. If a brief would put us on both sides, we take ourselves out of it.
Unclaimed means unverified, and we say so
Every profile written from public sources carries an unclaimed marker until the agency confirms it. We'd rather show you where a detail came from than imply a precision we don't have.
Method
How listings are researched
Agencies are identified from industry association membership, published client work and their own websites, with public agency directories as a starting point rather than a source. Those aggregator sites skew toward firms that pay to appear on them, so anything found there is checked against the agency's own site before it gets a profile — and the older independents they tend to miss get looked for deliberately.
Apart from the operator's own listing, which appears first in its disciplines, listings appear in a random order that changes regularly. There is no ranking and nothing to sell.
Everything else on an unclaimed profile — the disciplines, the sectors, the budget bands — is our reading of how an agency publicly positions itself. It is a starting point for a conversation, not a statement of fact about their capabilities, and it can be wrong.
We publish the source and the review date on every profile so you can see how much weight to put on it. When an agency claims a profile, their own description replaces ours and the unclaimed marker comes off.
Spotted something wrong? Tell us and we'll fix or remove it.
Get in touch
Corrections, removals, additions, or a question about a brief — all to the same inbox.