6 min Read
Has Creative lost its shine for ad agencies? Or is Creative & indeed the Ad Agency itself transforming?
Creative always was & remains an ad agency’s hook to attract & retain brands. Ad agencies traditionally used their creative skills to drive brand communication strategy with the brand’s consumers. This was the prescribed mode to build & sustain the brand.
That remains unchanged. What has changed is the definition of communication between brands & their consumers. This has expanded considerably to keep pace with the digital era. So also has Creative.
Not so long ago, communication between brands & clients was a one-way broadcast, which largely relied on creative messaging to communicate the brand values. Communication was largely restricted to a series of text & audiovisual messages (with generous doses of human angle).
Brand customers & prospects (target groups) were regularly exposed to such messages in a planned manner – to ensure maximum reach & impact at optimum cost.
Then the digital medium came along. It was initially seen as a new form of one-way commuication, via digital banners & messages. (Video was added later.)
When social media entered the scene, the messages became two-way with real time consumer feedback. These digital platforms soon made it easy for consumers to become content creators. Now brands not only had to respond to raw feedback directly from their consumers – but also react to their creative feedback! Naturally, the more creative the feedback, the more the appreciation from other consumers.
The potential “influence” of such creators was being noted by brands.
At some point, smart brand managers realised that such content creators could be channelised to their brand’s advantage. They tied up with the most popular ones, giving them the title of “Influencers”. Their brief was to influence their followers to adopt selected brands – with the help of creative content. This has led to the rise of an entire new sub vertical of ad agencies called Influencer Management Agencies.
On another front, user-experience design of e-commerce shopper pages complemented design of the traditional storefront physical user-experience design! This created another new vertical in ad agencies for E Commerce Agencies. These new verticals were created in addition to the existing ones like Social Media Management Agencies & Performance Marketing.
Brands were used to two-way communications with their consumers. (Creative included a special arm for the management of social media.)
Meanwhile, digitisation continued at a furious pace. User experience shifted from physical to physico-digital to pure digital – for some brand verticals. The meaning of Creative now included designing the digital user experience when engaging with apps & web pages. Creative still remains the “hook” that drives high-level strategy and ensures human connection with the brand.
It is based on Creative, that the plan for a brand’s digital transformation is created. And the brand’s digital products are built to sync with its physical presence. For this, tech & user experience capability (all synced with Creative) are essential for delivering a complete brand experience to consumers, across multiple touchpoints.
Welcome to the ad agency of 2026.
s your ad agency adds new services, there will be a need to auto track agency margins throughout the multiple activities of each day. As well as track client billing vs commitments & targets.
It may not be humanly possible for the same teams to focus on client deliveries as well as track & report agency margins. As each client’s complex campaign or job execution progresses on a daily basis, what any agency management will need is a central system for keeping their teams continuously aware of slips in agency margins – well before the billing stage.
We call this a central system of record.
Btw, many agencies are comfortable with spreadsheets for agency operations. We respect that, but this leads to decentralized data,
scattered all over the place. Some agencies feel that accounting systems are adequate to track margins – but that is always post-billing. You need to be alerted well before billing to take any real corrective action.
Finally, a few agencies even go to the other extreme of building & maintaining their custom internal systems at great expense
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