Agencies are hired for ideas, made real — and the way they organise that work is remarkably consistent from shop to shop. This guide explains the operating model in plain language: what an agency sells, how work is structured, who does what, how a piece of work travels from need to delivery, and where AI honestly helps. It is the model Tempera is built on, but the guide stands on its own.
What does a creative agency do?
A creative agency is a company that other companies hire to think up and make their advertising and marketing. A bank, a beer brand, or a telecom is good at its own business; it hires an agency for the people, time, and craft to produce great work. The product is ideas, made real, in four parts:
- The thinking — what should this brand say, to whom, and why? That is strategy.
- The idea — the creative concept that makes people stop, feel, and remember.
- The making — the actual ads: film, radio, billboards, social posts, packaging, sites.
- The placement — getting the work in front of the right people at the right time. That is media.
The client owns the brand; the agency is hired to grow and protect it by talking to the public on the client's behalf.
How is agency work organised?
Around a four-level hierarchy — the single most useful thing to understand about agencies, because everything else hangs off it.
- Client — the company that hires the agency and pays the bills. The relationship is long-term, and one person at the agency owns it.
- Brand — one client often owns several brands, each with its own personality, audience, and brand guidelines (the rulebook for how it may present itself). Work for one brand must never look or sound like another.
- Campaign — a focused push with a goal, a brief, a budget, and a deadline: launch the new bundle, win back lapsed customers, introduce a flavour. A brand runs many, sometimes at once.
- Activity — one concrete deliverable inside a campaign: a 30-second film, three radio scripts, a social set, a billboard, a press release. Each gets made, reviewed, approved, and shipped.
The chain in one sentence: a client owns brands; each brand runs campaigns; each campaign is delivered as a set of activities.
Who does what in an agency?
An agency is a wheel, not a list. At the hub sits Account Management — the client's point of contact, the translator of client need into agency instruction, and the place where accountability lives. Around the hub is the engine: Strategy (what the advertising should achieve and why — they write the brief), Creative (the idea: classically a copywriter and an art director, led by a creative director), and Design and Production (turning the approved idea into finished, polished deliverables). On the rim are the channels: Media (where and when the ads run), Digital, PR (earning attention rather than buying it), and Events. Smaller agencies combine departments and people wear several hats — but the functions are always there.
What are the three champions?
Good agencies hold three points of view in deliberate tension, each defended by a different discipline so no single interest dominates:
- the business champion — Account Management, defending the client and commercial reality;
- the consumer champion — Strategy, defending the audience the work must move;
- the brand champion — Creative, defending the idea and the brand's distinctiveness.
The three carry equal weight, and their disagreement is not a problem to smooth over — it is the mechanism. Work is argued over internally until all three are satisfied, and only then shown to the client. This is why agencies almost never present a first draft.
How does a piece of work flow?
The typical life of a piece of work runs through ten steps: the client has a need; the account manager and strategist turn it into a written brief (the contract — vague brief, bad work; sharp brief, good work); the disciplines are aligned on scope and timeline; creative develops concepts; the work passes the internal three-champion review; the account manager presents it; the client approves, rejects, or asks for changes; approved work is produced to final quality; media, digital, PR, and events place it; and the results are evaluated so the next brief starts smarter.
The key point: work is never just generated and shipped. Every piece passes through human judgement — internal review, then client approval — and that feedback shapes future work.
Who is accountable for a piece of work?
A widely used four-role shorthand: Responsible people do the work, and several can share it. Accountable is the single owner who signs it off — always exactly one. Consulted people give input before the work is done. Informed people are kept up to date. Account Management usually holds the accountable role even when a dozen specialists are doing the work. As decisions get bigger, ownership moves up the seniority ladder — but it never splits.
How big should the team be?
Agencies size the cast to the job. A routine task is Account Management alone; a strategy or creative task convenes the three champions; a single-channel production job adds Production and the relevant channel; a full integrated campaign brings seven or eight disciplines together. However big the job gets, two things stay constant: Account Management coordinates, and one person remains accountable.
What makes agency work hard — and where does AI honestly help?
Three things make the work demanding. Context is everything: good work depends on deeply knowing the brand — its history, voice, what the client loves and rejects — and that knowledge usually lives in people's heads, old emails, and past decks. Volume and repetition: much output is skilled variation on a theme — ten headlines, one post resized for five platforms. The blank page: starting from nothing is the slowest part of creative work.
AI helps with exactly those three: captured context that never leaves, fast first drafts and variations, and a strong starting point to react to. What it does not replace is the judgement about whether an idea is good, fits the brand, and will win the client. That call stays human — which is why ungoverned AI output so reliably reads as slop: it skips the judgement, not just the typing.
How does the media department work?
Media — deciding where the money goes — is a discipline with its own artifacts and gates. It produces two deliverables in strict order, separated by client approval. First the media strategy: a narrative deck arguing why this mix — audiences, the job of each channel, a phased roadmap, the top-level split. Gate one: the client accepts the strategy; nothing that commits money is built before this. Then the media plan (the flighting plan, or laydown): a working spreadsheet built from the approved strategy — channel, station, placement, rate, insertions per week, cost, expected reach — totalled by channel, market, and month. Gate two: the planning director approves, then the client, usually through a round of cut-the-budget, protect-the-reach.
Strategy decks look bespoke, but planners assemble them from recurring frames: Stop/Start/Continue reviews, From→To shifts per channel, the mapping matrix, persona cards with media habits, and the flighting timeline.
Why are numbers different in media?
A media plan carries the client's money. An invented rate, audience figure, or CPM is not a typo — it is a reputational incident scheduled for a client meeting. Real planners cite a named source on every data slide and make every derived cell in the workbook an auditable formula. Any AI drafting a media plan has to be held to the same bar: figures only from provided sources, assumptions labelled as assumptions, and the arithmetic computed by code — never by the model.
How does AV pre-production work?
Before a film is produced, the agency walks a fixed path, each step approved before the next: the creative brief (the problem the film must solve); concept territories (typically three genuinely distinct routes — the client picks one); the AV script (the two-column video/audio script, written per length and per language); the treatment (the director's-eye document: look, tone, pacing); the storyboard (the script as sequenced frames); and the pre-production pack (shot list, casting, locations, estimate). The agency's deliverable is the approved pack — production happens beyond it.
How does this map to Tempera?
Directly — the operating model above is the data model. The client, brand, campaign, and activity are the platform's hierarchy; the brief is a structured task; the three-champion gate is the human review step (approve, revise, reject — and whoever ran the work can never approve it); the accountable owner is a named field on every piece of work; the institutional memory is a per-client agent grounded in that client's own approved and rejected work; and the media and AV artifacts ship as task types whose briefing scaffolds encode the frameworks in this guide, under the numbers-integrity rule: the AI drafts the plan — it cannot invent a rate. We didn't invent a workflow and hope agencies adopt it; we modelled the one they already run.