Creative Agencies

A creative advertising agency is responsible for creating and executing advertising campaigns for its clients. A creative agency is concerned with what messages to convey to the target audience, and how to communicate the message in a creative way that gets it noticed.

In creative agencies you'll see people take briefs from clients, then recommend the best way to answer that brief through the production of ads. They develop scripts for television commercials, then make those commercials. They develop billboard executions, radio ads, digital and social media content, or build digital experiences.

The process of developing ads can involve market research, developing concepts and messages, creating visuals and copy, and production.

The key thing that distinguishes a creative agency from a media agency is that the creative agency decides how best to communicate a message and produces the 'ad' that does so. The media agency is concerned with where to best place that ad so that it is seen by the right audience. They then negotiate with media companies (such as TVNZ, Stuff, or Google and Meta) to buy the space that the ad appears in.

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Account planner

AccountPlanner

Planners are also sometimes known as Strategists, or Strategic Planners. By researching and talking to customers they learn what makes them tick, how they think and behave, and this information helps them develop a strategy – a way to approach the customers. This guides the creatives when coming up with ideas. Working across the business and closely with clients, the Account Planners are looking to find the right communication strategy for the right audience and then to inspire the creative teams to create it all.

See what it's like...

Aroha Gell

Associate Strategist at VMLY&R Wellington

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"If you’re nosy and you like wanting to make a difference, you can be a strategist nē! No path looks the same, karawhiua!"
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Aroha from VMLY&R
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Career progression

Your contribution to campaigns, the strength of the insights you provide and the ability to have extremely strong relationships within the agency will determine how quickly these promotions happen.

To be successful you'll need...

To be a consumer detective - be super curious, question everything and get excited by finding new information or find ways to identify what you want to know more about.
Happy to share insights early, and accept that you will never know everything, constantly learning and re-learning.
Lateral, analytical and strategic thinking, you are able to take creative thinking and apply it to business problems. Equal parts creative and logical.
To be fascinated by human behaviour, the social trends they follow, the impact of culture and how people are influenced.
Driven by numbers – analysing, interpreting, understanding and communicating complex and varied sources of data and statistics.
Pretty disciplined, autonomous and sometimes, quite academic in your approach.
A strong and persuasive communicator – can you simplify your research and strategic thinking, as well as draw coherent and logical conclusions.

Common Study Choices for Account Planners

Given the strong emphasis on human-centric approaches in this area of the agency, you are encouraged to pursue your preferred tertiary study. This enables you to leverage your existing knowledge while enhancing your research skills, analysis and critical thinking,  leading to the generation of valuable insights.

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Getting a job as an Account Planner

Many Planners start in other parts of the agency – as either Account Managers, Data Analysts or Market Researchers. This allows for you to get a good idea of how everything fits together before moving into a more strategic role.

Those roles could all be recruited for through graduate programmes (such as The Comms Council Grad Programme, before working your way towards a strategists role within the agency.

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