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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PR Executive

PR (Public Relations) Executives are part of a team of experts who specialise in public awareness stories, as well as building and maintaining public image for a company, organisation, or product - promoting brands and protecting them. They create media (from social content to press releases) that shape public opinion and are also critical in helping communicate complex information to a broad range of audiences (so they are very strong communicators). A branch of PR is also looking at experiences that can be created for people to interact with your client or product (called Experiential). PR professionals lean into a very strong media network, so they do spend a fair bit of time at events and getting coffees with people they know. PR Executives tend to work within a team of other PR experts and Experiential Producers.

See what it's like...

Joseph Polamalu

Account Manager at Mango Communications

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"No two days are ever the same!"
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Joseph Polamalu from Mango Communications
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Career progression

The effectiveness of your campaigns, the strength of the content you produce for your clients and the ability to have extremely strong relationships with your network will determine how quickly these promotions happen.
1. PR Executive
2. PR Coordinator
3. PR Specialist
4. PR Manager
5. PR Director
1. PR Executive
2. PR Coordinator
3. PR Specialist
4. PR Manager
5. PR Director

What might I be able to earn?

The following provides an indication of the sort of earnings that you can achieve in your career.

We’ve taken a selection of roles and provided indicative earning potential. Due to the merit-based nature of the industry, the different levels of responsibility that titles can carry – based on size of agency and nature of accounts – alongside geographical location and the different ways in which agencies interpret individual titles, these are indicative only.

To be successful you'll need...

Enjoy writing – grammar and a love of language and communicating.
A natural networker, negotiator, and communicator.
Love storytelling.
A very strong organiser – planning and managing projects.
Thinking creatively, strategically and critically, all at the same time.
Do you enjoy researching and finding small facts or information that would help to tell your clients  story?
Simplify complex information, and help influence peoples thinking through your communications.

Common Study Choices for PR Executives

Because communication is such a big part of this type of role, many PR professionals have done a Communications degree, or have focused on English or Histories – any tertiary degree which encourages you to research, think critically and get across your point of view – with the goal of convincing your audience of your position.

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Getting a job as a PR Executive

Networks and connections are a huge part of PR, and it is the case at the beginning of your career too. There are graduate programmes (see The Comms Council Graduate Programme) which introduce you to agency roles before you specialise.

You could also look at applying for entry level roles directly, making sure to emphasise your communication and organisational skills as well as your love of relationship building within your CV.

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