Marketing & creative
agency production
The production layer of an agency — campaign build, design and video production, scheduling, reporting and delivery admin — so your strategists and creatives spend their hours on the work clients actually pay for.
Agency margin dies in production
An agency sells strategy and creative and bills for time. What erodes the margin is production: resizing an asset for six placements, building the same campaign structure for the fourth client, assembling a monthly report, scheduling a content calendar, chasing client approvals.
It is real work and it has to happen, but it is being done by people whose rate assumes they are doing something else. So either the margin absorbs it or it happens after hours.
Offshore production capacity fixes the arithmetic directly. The strategy and the creative direction stay in-house; the execution scales without scaling your salary bill.
What an agency hands over first
- Campaign build — Ad sets, audiences, tracking and creative uploaded and configured to your brief, ready for your review before anything goes live.
- Design production — Master creative resized and adapted across every placement and format, to spec, without a designer doing it.
- Video editing and repurposing — Long-form cut into the short formats each platform wants, subtitled, thumbnailed and delivered.
- Content scheduling — Calendars built and scheduled across every client account, with approvals tracked.
- Reporting — Client dashboards and monthly reports built once and produced consistently rather than rebuilt by hand each month.
- Landing page and email build — Pages and campaigns assembled from your wireframes, tested end to end before handover.
- Client delivery admin — Approvals chased, assets collected, timelines tracked and status kept current so account managers stop chasing.
- Internal ops — Timesheets chased, project boards accurate, and resource planning data reliable enough to use.
The work that comes off your desk
Agency margin is lost in the build, not the thinking. Someone has to cut dozens of ad variants from one concept, wire the automation, chase the client for logins, and rebuild the same reporting pack every month for every account. Strategy and the client relationship stay with the account lead. It is the production line behind them that runs late.
Builds the structure in Meta Ads Manager to the agency's naming convention: objective, budget set at campaign or ad set level, audiences and exclusions, placements. Uploads creative variants against each ad set, writes primary text and headline options, and leaves the ads in draft for the buyer to publish.
Sets up search campaigns and Performance Max asset groups, loads keyword and shared negative lists, writes responsive search ad assets to the character limits, applies sitelinks and callouts, and works the search terms report weekly, pushing new negatives back to the shared list.
Resizes approved concepts across every required format in Canva — feed, story, reel cover, display banner — using the locked brand kit. Swaps copy and offer, checks safe zones and text placement, and exports named to convention with the source file left editable.
Rebuilds the monthly pack: spend, impressions, cost per result and conversions pulled from Meta, Google Ads, GA4 and the CRM into the Looker Studio template or slide deck. Checks figures reconcile against platform billing and drafts the commentary for the account lead to finish.
Loads the agency snapshot into a new sub-account, then reworks it for the client: pipeline stages, custom fields, calendars and availability, forms and their redirects, connected phone number and sending domain, and user permissions for the client's own team.
Builds workflows in GoHighLevel or HubSpot — lead source triggers, wait steps, if/else branches, internal notifications, task creation, pipeline stage moves. Tests end to end with a dummy contact, checks the SMS and email render on mobile, and documents the trigger logic for handover.
Places tags through Google Tag Manager, configures GA4 events and key events, links Google Ads conversion actions, checks the Meta dataset and event match quality, and applies the UTM convention so campaign traffic lands in the right column of the report.
Loads approved copy and creative into the scheduler channel by channel, matches captions to the calendar, sets first comments and link stickers, checks aspect ratios per placement, and confirms every post went live against the plan the client signed off.
Deduplicates contacts, standardises phone formats and lifecycle stages, repairs broken imports, updates opportunity values, and reconciles form submissions that never created a record. Rebuilds segments and suppression lists so the wrong people stop receiving campaign email.
Builds the email in HubSpot or the client's platform from the approved copy document, links tracked URLs, sets the send list and suppressions, and builds the matching landing page from the template with the form mapped to the right CRM fields.
Runs the new client checklist: partner access to Meta Business Manager and Google Ads, GA4 and Search Console permissions, DNS records for sending and domain verification, brand asset collection, and the kickoff questionnaire chased until it comes back complete.
Moves work through the approval chain: uploads drafts to the review board, chases feedback against the due date, logs revision rounds so out-of-scope work is visible at invoicing, and version-controls the final files into the client folder structure.
Checks daily spend against the monthly budget for every account, flags anything pacing over or under, reconciles platform invoices against what the client is billed, and prepares the media schedule and end-of-month spend summary for finance.
Pulls competitor ads from the Meta Ad Library, records the offer, format and how long each has been running, checks organic rankings and Google Business Profile listings, and keeps the shared tracker current for the strategist's quarterly review.
What stays with you
We are a staffing company, so this list argues against our own interest. It is also the part that matters: the work below is reserved, and no amount of supervision moves it. Get the line written down before anyone starts in an agency.
- Final sign-off on claimsMisleading or deceptive conduct is the advertiser's liability. Substantiating a claim — pricing, comparisons, savings figures, superlatives — is a judgement the agency principal makes before anything runs. It is not a production step.Australian Consumer Law, enforced by the ACCC and each state and territory fair trading agency
- Advertising standards approvalWhether a concept meets the AANA Code of Ethics and the relevant sector codes is decided in Australia. Complaints go to the Ad Standards Community Panel and are answered by the agency, not by production staff.AANA Codes, administered by Ad Standards
- Health service advertisingTestimonials about the clinical aspects of care — symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, outcome — cannot be used in advertising a regulated health service, and the cosmetic advertising rules that commenced on 2 September 2025 go further again: no influencer or patient testimonials, no advertising directed at under-18s, and before-and-after images must be unedited and comparable. Liability under section 133 follows whoever controls the advertising, which can include the agency as well as the practitioner — so the responsible advertiser and the account lead clear this work in Australia before it is built or booked.Section 133, Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, administered by Ahpra and the National Boards
- Consent, sending and callingThe client remains the authorising sender. Someone in Australia owns the consent record behind each list, the accuracy of the sender identification, and the decision to press send or start a calling campaign.Spam Act 2003 and Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (ACMA)
- Customer data uploadsWhether a client's customer list may be uploaded as a Meta or Google custom audience depends on the collection notice those people were given. That call belongs to the client and the account lead.Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles (OAIC)
- Therapeutic goods claimsCopy for medicines, medical devices and other therapeutic goods has to sit inside what the Advertising Code allows — and for listed medicines that means the permitted indications the product is actually listed against, while devices and other goods are held to their accepted evidence and intended purpose. Prescription-only medicines, and Schedule 8 medicines, cannot be advertised to the public at all. An Australian reviewer clears the claim before it is built.Therapeutic Goods (Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code) Instrument 2021, administered by the TGA
Roles for agencies
Graphic designer
Production design, resizing and adaptation at volume.
Explore →Video editor
Editing, repurposing, subtitling and thumbnails.
Explore →Digital marketing assistant
Campaign build, scheduling and reporting.
Explore →SEO specialist
Technical audits, on-page and content briefs.
Explore →SEM specialist
Paid search build, management and reporting.
Explore →Copywriter
Production copy to brief and to brand voice.
Explore →What stays in the agency
Production travels. Strategy, client relationships and anything that spends a client's money do not.
- Strategy and creative directionWhat the campaign says and why is what clients pay you for. Never delegated.
- Client relationshipsThey produce; account managers own the relationship and the results conversation.
- Ad spend authorisationBuilding a campaign is not authorising a budget. Spend approval stays with you.
- Client data accessGrant per-client access rather than blanket access, and check your own client agreements on subcontracting first.
Specialist roles for agencies
Three dedicated roles that take production off billable people without touching strategy.