A creative agency makes the advert; a media agency decides where it runs and buys the space. Here is why they split in the 1980s, who does what, how each is paid, and how to choose.
Media agency vs creative agency comes down to the message and the megaphone. A creative agency works out what a brand should say and makes the advert. A media agency works out who should see it, where, how often and at what price, and then buys the space. For most of advertising’s history one company did both, and the split is only about forty years old.
That split explains most of the confusion clients feel when they first hire an agency. Two companies, two contracts, two sets of people, and each will tell you the other is the reason the campaign underperformed. This piece sets out what each side actually does, why they separated, who the people are, how they are paid, and what the current drift back towards one-stop shops means for anyone choosing.
A creative agency turns a business problem into an idea and the idea into finished work. It takes a brief, interrogates it, writes a strategy, develops the campaign, and produces the films, posters, radio, social content and whatever else the plan calls for. Its output is the thing the public sees. When people say they love or hate an advert, they are reacting to the creative agency’s work.
The best known examples are the ones on this site. VCCP invented the meerkat because Google was charging Compare the Market more than £5 a click for its own name. Lucky Generals decided that Yorkshire Tea should show a company doing every trivial job properly. Neither idea has anything to do with where the advert ran, and both would have been wasted without a media plan that put them in front of enough people.
A media agency spends the money. It plans which channels the campaign should use, in what mix and sequence, and it negotiates and buys the television airtime, the poster sites, the search terms, the social impressions and the programmatic display. It then reports on what was delivered against what was promised. Its output is a schedule and a set of invoices, which is why media agencies are less famous and more powerful than creative ones.
Scale is the whole argument. WPP Media, Omnicom Media, Publicis Media, Dentsu and Havas Media between them handle the bulk of British advertising spend, and the discounts a buyer can extract from ITV or Meta depend on the size of the cheque. Yorkshire Tea’s media is planned by Goodstuff and its creative by Lucky Generals, two firms with different owners, which is the normal arrangement and works perfectly well when both are good.
Until the 1980s, the standard advertising agency was full-service. It planned the campaign, wrote it, made it and booked the space, and it was paid by the media owners rather than the client: a commission, fixed at 15 per cent of the media cost from around 1920, was rebated to the agency on every booking. A Harvard Business School analysis of the unbundling of agency services describes how that commission cross-subsidised everything else the agency did, and how it dissuaded agencies from splitting the media job off, because media was where the money came in.
The first cracks appeared in the 1970s. Chris Ingram set up The Media Department in 1972 and Chris Ingram Associates in 1976, buying media for clients who bought their creative elsewhere, and in the UK the Office of Fair Trading declared the fixed commission a restrictive practice, which removed the system’s legal underpinning. In Paris, Gilbert Gross had founded the business that became Carat in 1969 and grew it by pooling clients’ spend to buy at scale, an approach his obituary credits with pushing the big American agencies to unbundle in self-defence.
The decisive moment was 30 October 1988, when Saatchi & Saatchi merged the buying departments of its agencies into Zenith Media Buying Services, the first network to spin its media arm out as a separate company. Every other group followed within a decade, WPP eventually pulling the media departments of J Walter Thompson and Ogilvy into Mindshare, and by 2010 roughly two-thirds of the world’s media investment flowed through six holding companies’ media operations. Media agencies became bigger and more technical than the creative agencies they had been carved out of.
Called a planner in British creative agencies since Stephen King at J Walter Thompson and Stanley Pollitt at Boase Massimi Pollitt invented the job in 1968, the strategist works out what the advertising has to change and writes the creative brief. King’s five questions, from “where are we?” to “are we getting there?”, are still the spine of the planning process. A good strategist is the person who sends a brief back when it arrives as “we need a film”. In a media agency the equivalent role is the communications planner, who decides the shape of the media plan before anyone buys anything.
Creatives work in pairs, an art director and a copywriter, a structure Bill Bernbach introduced at Doyle Dane Bernbach and used to make Think Small. They take the strategist’s brief and turn it into the idea, then into scripts, layouts and scamps. Above them sit creative directors who choose between ideas, and a chief creative officer whose taste defines the agency. The creative department only exists in creative agencies, which is the simplest way to tell the two kinds apart.
Once an idea is sold, the producer turns it into a deliverable: choosing a director and production company, running the budget, managing the shoot, edit, sound and clearance, and getting the right versions to the right channels on time. Producers used to be a small department; now, with dozens of formats per campaign, production is often a separate business, as WPP’s Hogarth and the group’s new WPP Production unit show. The producer is the person who knows why the advert cost what it cost.
The media planner decides the mix. Given a budget, an audience and a creative idea, they set the split between television, video, outdoor, audio, search and social, the weight in each, the phasing across the year and the reach and frequency targets. Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA work, which found budgets split about 60:40 between brand building and activation outperform lopsided ones, is the planner’s most quoted text. Planners live in media agencies, but the good ones are involved before the creative work is made.
The buyer executes the plan and negotiates the price. Television buyers deal with the sales houses of ITV, Channel 4 and Sky against annual share deals; digital buyers run the auctions on Google, Meta, Amazon and TikTok and manage programmatic platforms; outdoor and audio buyers handle the rest. Buying is where the money is made and lost.
Creative agencies are paid in fees. The commission system gave way over the 1980s and 1990s to retainers, a fixed monthly fee for an agreed team, and project fees, a price per campaign, with output-based and performance-linked elements bolted on since. The Harvard analysis records that by the mid-2000s three-quarters of American agencies were fee-based and the average commission rate had fallen to 11 or 12 per cent on the accounts that still used it. The client is buying people’s time and ideas, and the negotiations are about how many people and how senior.
Media agencies are paid a fee too, usually a small percentage of the money they spend or a fixed sum benchmarked against it, but that is not where all the income comes from. The Association of National Advertisers’ 2024 report on principal media, summarised here, describes agencies buying inventory as the owner and reselling it to clients at an undisclosed margin, and found that 47 per cent of the marketers surveyed had used such deals in the previous year while 18 per cent did not know whether they had. The ANA’s advice is to require written approval and full audit rights before any principal deal. The short version for a client: a creative agency’s incentives are visible on the invoice, a media agency’s may not be.
Two trends are pulling against the forty-year split. The first is in-housing. The ANA’s 2023 in-house agency study found 82 per cent of its members had an in-house agency, up from 78 per cent in 2018, with 54 per cent handling some media planning or buying internally and 65 per cent having moved work from an external agency in the previous three years. Britain’s most durable example is Specsavers, which has written and produced “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” in-house since 2002.
The second is the holding companies rebuilding the full-service agency they dismantled, at group level rather than agency level. Publicis has sold its Power of One model, a single client team across creative, media, production and data, for the best part of a decade, and it has posted the industry’s best growth doing so. WPP’s Elevate28 plan aims to turn the group from a holding company into “a single integrated company” with Media, Creative and Production as internal units. Omnicom used the Interpublic deal to cut its creative networks to three and its media networks to six, all selling what it calls connected capability.
Neither trend has killed the specialist. In-house teams tend to keep the high-volume, low-risk work and still go outside for the brand campaign, and the integrated group pitches still put a media planner and a creative team in the room, they just share a parent. What has changed is that “media agency versus creative agency” is no longer only a choice between two suppliers. It is also a choice between two suppliers, one supplier, or your own staff.
| Creative agency | Media agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Core question | What should the brand say, and how? | Who should see it, where, how often and at what price? |
| Output | Strategy, the idea, finished films, posters, digital and social assets | The media plan, the bookings, the delivery and performance reports |
| Key people | Strategist (planner), creative teams, creative directors, producers, account handlers | Communications planners, channel specialists, buyers, analysts, account handlers |
| How they are paid | Retainers, project fees, sometimes output or performance bonuses | A fee as a percentage of spend or a fixed sum; sometimes margins on principal media |
| What to judge them on | Ideas, craft, and business results attributable to the work | Reach and frequency delivered, price against benchmarks, transparency, effectiveness measurement |
| Typical UK names | adam&eveTBWA, AMV BBDO, Mother, BBH, VCCP, Uncommon | Mindshare, EssenceMediacom, OMD, Zenith, Carat, the7stars |
| Where the money goes | Fees are the whole bill | Fees are a small slice; the media budget is the rest |
| Owned by | Holding companies, consultancies, private equity or founders | Overwhelmingly the six holding companies, plus a few independents |
Start with the problem, not the supplier. If nobody knows what the brand should stand for, the shortage is strategy and creative, and no media plan fixes it. If the idea is sound and sales are flat, the shortage may be reach, and the media agency is the conversation to have first. Most clients with a media budget of a few hundred thousand pounds upwards will end up with both, and the decision is really about how to make two companies behave like one.
Creative agencies make the work, media agencies plan and buy where it runs, and full-service agencies do both, usually now as an integrated team inside a holding company. Around them sit specialists in digital, social, PR, experiential, sports and production, and a growing number of in-house agencies owned by advertisers themselves.
A few do, and some clients ask them to on small budgets, but most creative agencies stopped when the networks spun their media arms out in the late 1980s and 1990s. For anything beyond a modest digital budget, buying power and specialist tools sit with the media agencies.
The creative agency’s fees are usually the larger line, because you are paying for senior people and production, while the media agency’s fee is a small percentage of the spend it manages. The media budget itself dwarfs both, which is why the media agency’s transparency matters more than its fee.
If you are spending enough to advertise on television or at national scale, almost certainly yes, or one integrated team that contains both. Smaller advertisers often pair a creative shop with an in-house or freelance digital buyer, which works until the budget outgrows it.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
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