Glossary

The vocabulary, settled.

Agency and platform terms defined in one or two quotable sentences — each with its own anchor.

Agency and platform terms defined in one or two quotable sentences — each with its own anchor.

Last updated Aug 31, 2026 · 5-minute read

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The words agencies and this platform use, defined plainly. Each term is one anchor — link to it, quote it, settle the argument.

Creative agency

A company hired by other companies to think up and make their advertising and marketing: the strategy, the creative idea, the production, and the media placement.

Client

The company that hires the agency and pays the bills. Agency work is organised under clients, and in Tempera a client is also the billing unit: you pay for clients that had AI work that month.

Brand

A product or identity a client owns, with its own personality, audience, and rules. One client often owns several brands, and work for one must never look or sound like another.

Brand guidelines

The brand's rulebook: logo usage, colours, typography, tone of voice, and what the brand may and may not do. The first thing a per-client agent is grounded in.

Campaign

A focused marketing push with a goal, a brief, a budget, and usually a deadline. A brand runs many campaigns, sometimes several at once.

Activity

One concrete deliverable inside a campaign — a film, a radio script, a social set, a billboard. Each activity gets made, reviewed, approved, and shipped.

Brief

The written contract for a piece of work: goal, audience, budget, deadline, must-haves, and brand rules. Vague brief, bad work; sharp brief, good work.

Account management

The hub of the agency wheel: the client's point of contact, the coordinator of disciplines, and the place where accountability for a piece of work lives.

The three champions

The deliberate internal tension good agencies maintain: Account Management defends the business, Strategy defends the consumer, Creative defends the brand — all three must be satisfied before the client sees anything.

Accountable owner

The single named person who signs off a piece of work. Many people can be responsible for doing it; exactly one is accountable, and the buck stops there.

RACI

A four-role shorthand for who does what: Responsible (does the work), Accountable (the one owner who signs off), Consulted (input before), Informed (kept up to date).

Review gate

The human approval step between generated work and the client. In Tempera it is enforced in code: whoever ran the work cannot approve it, and nothing is client-ready without a named sign-off.

Maker/checker

The rule that the person who makes a thing cannot be the one who approves it — banking's dual control, applied to creative work. Tempera's server rejects self-approval as an invariant, not a setting.

Media planning

The discipline of deciding where advertising money goes: which channels, when, at what cost, for what expected reach. It produces two artifacts in strict order — the media strategy, then the flighting plan — each behind a client gate.

Media strategy

The narrative deck that argues why this channel mix: audiences, the job of each channel, a phased roadmap, and the top-level budget split. Gate one — nothing that commits money is built before the client accepts it.

Flighting plan

Also called the media plan or laydown: the working spreadsheet that commits money line by line — channel, placement, rate, insertions per week, cost, expected delivery — totalled by channel, market, and month.

Numbers integrity

The rule that a generated media deliverable may only use figures found in provided sources, must label assumptions as assumptions, and never lets the model do the arithmetic — totals are computed by code. In short: the AI drafts the plan; it cannot invent a rate.

Concept territories

Genuinely distinct creative routes — typically three — presented so the client can pick a direction before scripts are written. A structured brainstorm with a decision at the end.

AV script

The two-column film script — video action on one side, audio and voice-over on the other — written per length (60s hero, 30/15/6s cutdowns) and per language version.

Treatment

The director's-eye document for a film: look, tone, pacing, and references — how the approved script will feel on screen.

Storyboard

The script as a sequence of drawn or rendered frames with captions — action, voice-over, supers, duration — so everyone agrees what will be shot before anything is shot.

Persona card

A named portrait of an audience: life stage, income, pains, goals, and their media habits per channel, ending in one line on how to reach them.

Active client

Tempera's billing meter: a client that had at least one AI task generated that month. Dormant clients cost nothing, so you can keep your whole book on the platform — an agency's roster or a freelancer's.

Workspace mode

How a Tempera installation is weighted to its operator: agency (the flagship), in-house brand team, or solo. A mode relabels the vocabulary and defaults — departments or projects standing where clients and campaigns stood — and never removes the review gate or the underlying structure.

Solo plan

Tempera's plan for independents and freelancers: the same governed workflow at a desk of one, per active client. While a sole operator works alone the review step records their own verdicts; a second active user re-enables maker/checker automatically.

BYOK

Bring your own keys: running AI generation on your own provider accounts. You pay the provider directly at cost, and the platform bills only its fee.

Mock mode

Tempera's evaluation mode: the entire workflow — briefs, options, the review gate, delivery — running with no AI keys, no card, and no client data, on plausible labelled samples.

Context

Everything a client's agent is grounded in: brand guidelines, approved work, rejected work with reasons, correspondence, and research. In Tempera, context is scoped per client — one client's material is never visible to another's agent.

AI slop

Generic, ungoverned AI output shipped without judgement — plausible at a glance, worthless under a client's eye. Slop is what you get when generation skips the client's history and the human verdict; a review gate and per-client grounding are the difference between slop and work that passes.

Prove it on one client

See one client move from context to approved work.

Run a real brief through Tempera in mock mode. Follow it from grounded options to a named human verdict and client-ready work.

No AI keys. No card. Nothing reaches a client without review.