Project Management Software for Advertising Agencies
A launch date fixed six months ago, a fifth round of creative review underway, and a client who wants to see a sixth.
The campaign doesn't slip quietly, it slips all at once
An advertising agency's calendar looks different from a content shop's. Instead of a constant stream of small deliverables, there's a handful of campaigns running at any time, each with a launch date set months out: a product reveal, a seasonal push, media already booked, and very little slack once that date gets close. When something goes wrong, it doesn't show up as a slow week. It shows up as a launch date that can't move and creative that isn't approved yet, with a media buy already locked in behind it.
The actual bottleneck is rarely production. It's the review cycle: creative goes to the client, comes back with changes, goes to legal, comes back with more changes, and by round four nobody remembers which version is current or who's waiting on whom. Each round costs days, and because campaigns are infrequent, there's no accumulated instinct for how long a cycle really takes. So the schedule gets built on hope rather than history, and the hope is usually wrong in the same direction every time.
ShipSprint doesn't try to make the client approve faster. It makes the agency's side of the cycle visible: what's currently with the client, what's been sitting in a queue too long, and whether the current pace of review rounds still lands the campaign by its date, with enough lead time to actually do something about it if it doesn't.
It also means a launch date isn't riding on a single spreadsheet somebody built the week the campaign was won. As the account, creative and production teams all touch the same board, the plan updates itself from what's actually happening rather than from whoever remembered to update the tracker last. For an agency, that's the difference between hearing about a stalled review secondhand in a hallway and seeing it flagged on the board before it's cost you a day.
Built around the launch date, not the task list
Six pieces for work that arrives in a handful of large, high-stakes waves rather than a constant stream.
Boards carry per-column WIP limits, so a campaign stuck under review doesn't silently pile up work behind it, and new briefs land in a triage inbox instead of a creative director's messages, so nothing starts before it's been scoped against what's already committed.
Delivery forecasts are calculated from the team's measured pace as sprints or review cycles complete, so a schedule assuming a one-week review round shows the risk weeks before the launch date does, once real rounds are running longer than that. That's early enough to compress production elsewhere or renegotiate the date itself.
Logging a day's hours takes about five seconds and sits next to the task just finished. On campaign work billed by the hour or reconciled against a fixed fee, that's the difference between an invoice built on real numbers and one built on someone's memory of a hectic month.
Everyone opens to a "my day" screen: today's items, a one-tap time log, and one tap to say "I'm blocked", which pulls in whoever owns the hold-up, with context already attached, instead of a hallway conversation nobody else can see.
A built-in wiki keeps brand guidelines, past client decisions and legal sign-offs next to the campaign they belong to, with page history, so round five doesn't quietly contradict a call made in round two. Any sentence can become a task.
The owner command center answers "where is every campaign right now?" in a single screen, and a Monday digest arrives without anyone building a deck to explain it internally first.
The review cycle is the schedule risk, so treat it like one
Most campaign timelines assume a review round takes a week. Most review rounds don't, and the gap between the two is where launch dates actually get lost. It's rarely in production, which is usually the most predictable part of the process.
- WIP limits on the review column show when creative is queued waiting on a client, not stalled on the agency's side; from outside the board, the two look identical otherwise
- A triage inbox on incoming feedback means "the client made one small change" doesn't quietly turn into a new brief nobody scoped
- Forecasts rebuilt from actual review-round pace catch a campaign on its third round with a fixed launch date six weeks out, not two days out
- A wiki page per campaign holds every sign-off, so a legal note from round two doesn't get relitigated in round five
- A separate media-and-print-deadline column keeps a booked media slot visible as a hard constraint on the schedule, not just a date written in someone's notebook
The same subscription covers the rest of the agency too: engineering, HR, marketing and operations each get their own templates and vocabulary. ShipSprint also connects to Claude and ChatGPT, so a producer can ask "what's still with the client on the autumn campaign" without opening the board. See what's included on the product overview.
New business runs alongside live campaigns, not instead of them
The other thing that makes an advertising agency's calendar hard to read is that pitch work and live campaign work compete for the same senior creative people, and pitches don't announce themselves in advance the way a scheduled campaign does. A strong brief can land the same week a launch is entering its fourth review round, and both need the same handful of people at their best.
Because pitch work and client work sit on boards inside the same workspace, a creative director planning next week isn't guessing at capacity from memory. The command center shows who's already stretched across a live launch before a pitch gets assigned to them, which is usually the point where an agency either protects its best campaign or quietly damages it to chase new business.
None of this requires treating a pitch as a lesser project. It gets its own board, its own deadline, and the same triage inbox for incoming requests as any retained account. The difference is that everyone planning around it can see the collision coming before it happens, not after a launch date has already been promised to two different priorities.
It matters for time logging too. Pitch hours are real hours, whether or not the pitch is won, and an agency that can see exactly how much unbilled time went into new business over a quarter is negotiating its next fee from actual numbers rather than a rough sense that "we're always stretched around pitch season."
Common questions
Yes. A board doesn't need constant throughput to be useful. What matters is that forecasts are built from your team's actual measured pace as work moves through the board, so even an occasional big campaign gets a real forecast rather than a date picked at the kickoff meeting.
Each round can be its own stage on the board, with WIP limits that show when work is queued waiting on the client rather than stalled internally, a distinction that matters when a launch date is fixed and nobody wants to guess where the delay actually sits.
Free covers up to 5 users and 2 projects, forever. Team is ₹299 per user per month, or ₹2,899 a year, for up to 40 users. Business, at ₹599 per user per month or ₹6,499 a year, adds forecasts, scorecards and the owner command center, most useful once a campaign is big enough that a missed launch date is genuinely expensive, and once new-business pitches are competing with live work for the same senior people. Every paid plan includes a 14-day full-access trial on Business, sample project preloaded, no card needed. Full breakdown on the pricing page.
No. No screenshots, no keystroke logging, no activity tracking, only outcomes: what got delivered and the hours logged by the person who did the work. Scorecards are leave-adjusted and visible to the person they describe. Details are on the security overview.
Yes. A pitch gets its own board with its own deadline and its own triage inbox, inside the same workspace as every live campaign, so a creative director can see who's already stretched on a launch before assigning them to a pitch, rather than finding out the two collided after both were promised.
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