A long-held wish of mine was to explore the agency world from inside. I wanted to see how briefs turned into campaigns, how creative teams worked, and what made a great agency tick. As I was finishing my marketing degree at the University of Lima, with a specialisation in advertising, I had the chance to work at Publicis. It was 2007. The industry looked very different then.
Looking back, it’s the kind of experience every communicator and marketer should have on their CV. Understanding the advertising process from the inside is a key skill not everyone has: a strong differentiator in the job market, and a sharper lens for daily decisions and judgement. A decade later, in 2018, I had the chance to relive that thrill when I visited several Melbourne agencies including Initiative, Deepend, and Ogilvy: a different market, but the same fundamentals at work.
The exposure to roles, rhythms, and craft you don’t see from the client seat changes how you read a brief, how you frame a budget, and how you treat the people producing your work. The mechanical knowledge alone (what a high-resolution file is, why a job takes 10 minutes versus a week, where the cost levers sit) is hard to replicate from the outside.
The work, then and now
The classic definition is that an advertising agency takes a marketing problem and turns it into creative work that runs across paid channels at scale. The traditional split is 4 functions: account management owns the client relationship, strategy frames the brief and audience, creative produces the concepts and craft, production turns approved work into deliverables. That structure still exists, especially inside the big network agencies. But what an agency delivers has shifted considerably from what it did years ago.
Three things have shifted the most. The first is scope. An advertising agency mostly meant television, print, and outdoor work. The brief now spans every channel a brand might touch (social, content, performance, video, experiential), and most of it gets briefed in shorter cycles, against tighter budgets, with faster turnaround expectations than the long-form campaign rhythms of the early 2000s.
Competition has changed too. Agencies now sit alongside in-house creative teams that have absorbed huge volumes of routine content work, freelance networks that can be assembled per project, and consultancies that have built their own creative capabilities. And AI has done to production what in-housing did to volume content: compressed the cost of execution and pushed the value of agency work toward strategy, brand thinking, and senior creative judgement.
What hasn’t changed is the principle that the brief determines the outcome. Tools and channels evolve. Strategy and clarity don’t.
The brief is the lever
I had a useful conversation about this in late 2017 with Fiorella Gutierrez, a Peru-born marcom professional who has worked across agency and client sides, now based in Canada. Her strongest framing was that the best brief is collaborative. The agency knows what information it needs to produce great work; the client knows the business, the audience, and the constraints.
Sit down and build the brief together. The plan, the timeline, and the budget all come back sharper because both sides understand from the start what’s being asked for.
“You can’t outsource clarity.”
That’s the line of hers that stuck with me. The client’s job is to be clear about the business problem, the audience, and the success measures before the work goes into creative.
A good brief covers 6 things, and a vague brief on any of them produces 10 rounds of “can we try something different.” Business objective. Target audience, in human terms. Core message / key idea. Honest budget and timeline. Agreed success measures. Non-negotiables: legal, brand, channel, anything that’s genuinely fixed. Everything else is up for discussion in the briefing conversation. Many agency frustrations come back to a vague brief that no amount of creative work can fix.
Working with an agency well
A few patterns worth noticing. The human relationship matters before you need it. The first in-person meeting changes the working dynamic in ways video calls rarely do. The people on your account are partners. Quick feedback and approvals keep the work moving. Being clear about constraints saves time, and bringing the agency into the conversation early often reveals perspectives your internal team may have missed. Pay invoices on time and acknowledge good work when it lands.
The production side
When an agency presents production options (usually 3 production houses, each with a director and storyboard), choose based on the work, not familiarity. Agencies often have preferred partners they know well, but the best creative fit for your project may be another option. Fiorella’s point on this was sharp: the decision is yours, and your job is to read the proposals on their merits.
The other is to know what’s reasonable to expect. A high-resolution adapted asset takes a designer 10 minutes, not a week. A simple file conversion is a few clicks. Even something as routine as burning a TV commercial copy for delivery to broadcasters before the daily 6 o’clock cut-off is a quick mechanical task. If you don’t know that, you’ll quietly pay agency rates for the privilege. The mechanical literacy that comes from time on the agency side will save you money on every project that follows.
The external perspective
What an agency genuinely brings that an in-house team rarely can is cross-category experience. Their senior people have worked on dozens of brands across categories you’ve never touched, seen what works in adjacent industries, what pattern repeats, what shortcut to avoid. That outside view, applied to your specific business problem, is what no in-house team can replicate at the same depth.
Most marketers get too close to their own brand, product, or service to see clearly how to communicate it. An external team brings the distance you’ve lost. They’ll tell you when your message has stopped landing, when the category has moved, when the assumption you’ve been briefing on for years no longer holds. That perspective, brought into the brief alongside your own thinking, is how outstanding mass-advertising work gets made. The marketers who get the most from these relationships actively pull on that outside view to shape their thinking.
The frame
The agencies thriving today have leaned into this. AI has commoditised execution, in-housing has absorbed volume content, and what’s left for the agency to sell is judgement, perspective, and senior craft. That’s a healthier model for everyone. It’s also a higher bar, for the agency and for the client, who has to know how to use that depth of partnership well.
The brief. The relationship. The external perspective. The work that comes back will almost always be better than what you would have made on your own.