Advertising agency software: 9 options for your team

Let’s take an in-depth look at the features that make these results possible. 

Creative project management 

Managing creative projects is a balancing act like no other.

• Your team needs space and time to share new ideas and innovate, but within the strict framework that helps you meet your briefs and deadlines. 
• Your work needs to convey your agency’s point of view to build your reputation, while also establishing a distinctive brand voice for your clients. 
• Your time needs to be spent managing client relationships and getting their deliverables over the line, while simultaneously monitoring the internal processes that keep your business running. 

When you run an agency, your software setup can give you all the information you need to manage the contrasting demands with ease, or it can create huge — and even risky — gaps in your process. 

With Wrike, you can centralize your project work and set yourself up for success. 

Our advertising agency software comes with features for:

• Effortless project intake, with custom request forms and template tasks for all your upcoming projects
• Intuitive delegation, as you assign new project tasks with just a few clicks, based on your team members’ skill sets, experience, and capacity
• Automated workflow management and tracking, with workflow templates and automations to speed up your common tasks, from scheduling content calendars to processing internal requests
• Detailed time tracking, either as you complete your tasks or retrospectively, so you can make informed decisions about your project planning and resource allocation
• At-a-glance workload prioritization, as Wrike displays all your work in progress in real-time dashboards to give you 360° visibility across your campaigns

By informing your project management decisions and making it easy to implement them, Wrike boosts communication, productivity, and efficiency across your agency team.

Client management

When you have an agency to run, your internal communications and project management are only one piece of the puzzle. You also have to deliver an exceptional client experience on all your new and ongoing projects. 

By setting expectations, opening up communication, and addressing your clients’ pain points as they emerge, you can exceed expectations and consistently deliver excellent work. 

Wrike includes all the tools you need to manage your client relationships and adapt your process to their preferences. Some clients will prefer a hands-off approach after the brief is finalized, while others want a detailed overview of your progress and more creative input throughout. Wrike adapts to these different expectations while still providing the clear framework that prevents scope creep and keeps your team on track. 

Wrike’s client management features include: 

• Customizable permissions to create a dedicated project space where clients can view your work, while sensitive data, like your finances and time tracking, stays private for your team
• Snapshots to generate scannable views of your project’s current status, giving clients regular updates at a glance
• Custom reports to filter your task management data into more detailed, tailored reports, which can even eliminate the need to schedule time-consuming progress meetings
• Easy client communication from within Wrike*

*Even if your client isn’t a Wrike user, you can contact them by email from within your workspace, and their replies will appear as comments on your task card.

We’ve also seen agencies use Wrike to build a CRM system that seamlessly connects to their project work. By creating profiles to track leads, highlight active clients, and track communications, project notes, and actionable items in one place, your team can respond more effectively to meet your clients’ needs.  

These features help you build trust, loyalty, and lasting client relationships — all of which are crucial as you set out to grow your reputation as an agency. 

Creative asset production

As well as handling your project and client management, you can use Wrike to streamline the processes your agency uses to produce design assets like written content, images, and video. 

Even the most creative work is built by following a shared project roadmap. When you execute your work in Wrike, you have all the tools to collaborate as you follow your creative process, and then review and approve the assets you produce. 

Whatever you’re producing for your advertising clients, Wrike includes: 

• Over 400 powerful integrations with tools including Adobe Creative Cloud, so you can automate your workflows from end to end
• Collaborative editing features, so you can discuss and edit your work in real time, even with a distributed team
• Comprehensive versioning tools and file routing to document your creative process without disrupting it — perfect if you need to recall an earlier file, view client feedback, or review your project for auditing purposes
• Proofing and review tools to help you produce consistent, compliant work — whether that’s for an internal review before sending it to the client or for their final stamp of approval as the project draws to a close

With these tools, you have a safety net that ensures you meet your clients’ expectations and communicate them to your team, even as your agency scales up to produce work for multiple channels and projects.

Case study: Ogilvy Australia 

Renowned internationally and with a string of industry awards, Ogilvy is one of the most recognizable names in advertising. However, a big reputation and high-profile clients came with significant challenges in terms of managing and prioritizing work — as well as creating transparency for a team distributed across offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

Before adopting Wrike, Ogilvy Australia relied on a paper-based workflow. Though the agency continued to be successful, it struggled behind the scenes with a lack of accountability, and it was difficult for managers and team members to get an accurate impression of where they were at with their projects. 

Steven Dunn, Senior Integrated Project Manager at Ogilvy Australia, told us that before Wrike, “you would be emailing someone, and you never knew what happened in the email communication between those two people.” Reliant on emails between clients and account managers, the team was also receiving requests in many different formats — another barrier to setting and fulfilling client expectations. 

Initially, Ogilvy adopted Wrike to digitize the workflows it used to put creative briefs together. This was a huge opportunity to free up the team to focus on producing client work, and give managers more time to foster relationships with their clients. 

Since the initial switch, features like template workflows, request forms, dashboards, and @mentions have played a role in optimizing Ogilvy’s daily operations even further.  Plus, team members note approval tracking as a key victory, making their process more effective even for their highest-volume projects. 

“There has been an improvement in quality, in making sure things are getting signed off, which is so key to our business,” Dunn explains. As well as delivering better results and a better experience for their clients, Wrike’s system has improved morale and communications within the team.