The agency world is broad, and that is reflected in the kinds of apps we build for agencies. For one agency, a campaign management dashboard is central, bringing together all brands, campaigns, deadlines and reports, often connected to Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok Ads via their marketing APIs, so performance no longer has to be copied into a spreadsheet every week. For another agency, it is an asset library with DAM: an environment where photo, video, copy and design assets are managed centrally, with rights management, expiry dates for talent and music licences, and an API that lets a client's own marketing team access approved assets directly.
A third group of agencies would benefit most from a client portal for agencies: an environment where each client gets their own view of their ongoing campaigns, invoice status, briefs, approvals and reports. No more email chains about whether "that one banner from last week" has been approved, no yearly "could I have the Q2 creative again" request, and no hassle with SharePoint permissions. The same architecture often forms the basis for a white-label app for agency clients: the agency supplies the software, and the client experiences it as their own tool. The overlap with B2B software is considerable. For the details of that context, we deliberately point you to our page on building a B2B app.
For performance and media agencies, we often build an attribution and measurement platform: a custom layer on top of Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Display & Video 360 and the client's own CRM data, with first-party tracking and server-side events so that the erosion of third-party cookies doesn't undermine all your reporting. Under the hood, such a platform relies on a data layer for which we often build a custom data engineering platform, with BigQuery or Snowflake as the warehouse, dbt for transformations, Airflow or Prefect for orchestration, and a visualisation layer in Looker, Metabase or a custom front end.
For agencies that publish their own content, such as content marketing units, editorial platforms and branded magazines, we build content collaboration platforms where editorial, design and final review share one workflow, with a publishing pipeline to the agency's or client's own CMS. Where editorial and commerce overlap, for example a lifestyle publisher selling its own products or a fashion agency publishing shoppable content, we draw on our experience with headless commerce platforms to combine CMS and e-commerce in one solution.
For production houses, photo and video studios and post-houses, we build project management and planning tailored to production: shoot planning, crew call sheets, equipment tracking, on-set photo and video upload with automatic metadata tagging, and a review environment where the director and the client work side by side. For digital studios and UX agencies, we deliver testing and hand-off tools that run alongside Figma and Storybook and speed up handover to clients' development teams. And for agencies with their own network of freelancers or suppliers, we build a marketplace layer where briefings, availability, contracts and invoices all come together in one place.
The common thread running through all of this: the software follows your process, your client mix and your brand, not the other way round. We build vendor-independent, which means that a future IT partner of your client or of your own agency can take over the code, the data and the hosting without Appfront becoming indispensable. That reflects how we view agency software: an agency should not be locked into a tool once it starts to grow seriously.
