Avoiding overbooked creative teams and missed pitch deadlines
A large media agency plans 220 campaigns a month with more than 900 creative tasks. An agentic workflow makes bottlenecks visible early.
- Media
- Marketing
Key metric
Planning effort per campaign
63h
Average planning effort per campaign
At a glance
Starting point
A large media agency with several locations serves international brands in always-on and campaign communication. Around 220 campaigns are planned each month, from social-only activities to multichannel launches. These generate about 900 creative tasks for concept, copy, design and adaptations. Capacity is estimated in spreadsheets and presentations, based on experience and rough task lists. Changes to briefings, additional markets or new formats are sent later by email and chat. Project management tries to transfer this information into capacity plans by hand, while creative teams work on several pitches and ongoing campaigns in parallel.
- 220
- Campaigns per month
- 900
- Creative tasks per month
The challenge
The agency has to commit to binding timings and pitch dates with its clients, even though the actual workload of the creative teams is only roughly estimated. For each of the 220 campaigns, an average of four creative tasks is planned, varying widely in scope. Effort estimates come out of meetings and chats but are rarely documented consistently. When clients request additional assets or markets, tasks are added ad hoc without seeing the overall load. This leads to overbooking, with some weeks well above 1,600 hours of planned creative work and others with idle time. Pitches compete with ongoing campaigns, leading to night shifts, late deliveries and internal conflicts. Utilization reporting is only possible in hindsight.
Typical symptoms in the company
Why this remained unsolved
The problem had been known for years but was accepted as an unavoidable agency reality. Earlier attempts relied on new spreadsheet templates or generic project management tools, which did not fit the dynamic briefings and many special cases. A fully integrated solution seemed too costly, since campaign data sits in several systems and creative work is hard to squeeze into rigid tickets. The topic was also considered too operational to justify a dedicated IT project, yet too complex to solve with simple macros or standard dashboards. So planning remained stuck between gut feeling, Excel and overtime.
Our solution
Together with the agency, we built an agentic workflow that plans creative capacity along the actual campaign work. Briefings from forms, emails and presentations are automatically translated into structured tasks, including channels, formats and markets. An assistant suggests realistic effort based on historical data and text content and assigns tasks to the appropriate roles. In a central board, project management and client service see how new requests affect team workload and can play through scenarios. The workflow synchronizes status and deadlines with existing campaign tools and produces weekly capacity reports for creative and management.
Where generative AI comes in
Generative AI analyzes briefing texts, presentations and emails, recognizes channels, formats, markets and deliverables and suggests suitable task packages with effort ranges. It writes structured task descriptions, interprets unclear briefings, suggests follow-up questions and takes special cases such as country-specific adaptations into account.
- Parsing of briefing forms, emails and presentations into structured campaigns and creative tasks with roles and deadlines
- Generative creation and updating of task descriptions, including channels, formats, markets and dependencies for the creative teams
- Agentic capacity planner that matches tasks against availability, simulates scenarios and flags bottlenecks early
- Synchronization of status, deadlines and owners with the agency’s existing campaign and project management tools
- Weekly capacity reports and pitch overviews for creative, project management and the management board
How the implementation went
Process mapping
Workshops with creative, project management and client service to capture briefing sources, roles, typical task packages and bottlenecks.
Data basis and prototype
Analysis of historical campaigns and tasks, and building a prototype that derives tasks automatically from real briefings.
Integration and rollout
Connecting campaign tools and calendars, gradual rollout in two units, accompanying training and fine-tuning of the effort logic.
Measured: impact after six months of operation
Period: impact after six months of operation.
| Metric | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Planning effort per campaignKey metric | from 6 to 3 hours per campaign | Time tracking before/aftermeasured |
| Creative team overbooking | Down from 40 to 15 hours per week | Time tracking before/afterestimated |
| Quality of effort suggestionsQuality measure | usable without correction in 82% of cases | Samplemeasured |
Cost-effectiveness
The solution depends on the quality of the briefings. If the client team provides unstructured or late information, the workflow can still make suggestions but cannot fully prevent peaks in workload.
Integration and operations
Transferability
The agentic workflow for capacity planning can be transferred to other knowledge-intensive creative and project environments where tasks arise from unstructured briefings. Prerequisites are sufficient historical data on tasks and effort, and teams that structure their work into clearly nameable deliverables. Generative AI can then derive realistic task packages from free text, match capacity against availability and make bottlenecks visible early.
A similar case in your organization? Let’s talk.
Briefly describe your process. We’ll get back to you with an initial assessment of whether the pattern can be transferred, and what it realistically takes.