Which Parts Of A Digital Agency Can Be Done From Another Country? The Industry Just Published The List.

Production, trafficking, reporting, scheduling and media reconciliation can be done from another country. Client contact, the pitch and creative direction cannot, because they are most of the reason a client renews. Every agency owner half knows that division. Last week the industry wrote it down and called it a protocol.

Outstaffer’s interest is worth declaring early: it employs people where they live and puts them on your team, so the employment side of a move like that is what it sells.

The agency industry just published its own list of movable work

On 23 October, AgenticAdvertising.org launched in Australia at a Sydney event of almost 300 marketers, agency executives and media owners, reported by Mumbrella. It brought AdCP, an open standard for handing media buying to software.

Read the media buy specification as a resourcing document rather than a technical one. It runs seven steps: request proposals, compare and refine, check creative requirements, finalise and accept, governance and creative supply, match at serve time, then monitor and control delivery. Its worked example is a senior media buyer at an agency.

A standards body does not write a protocol for work that turns on judgement. It writes one for work that is mechanical enough to specify.

So which agency functions does the standard treat as mechanical?

Those seven steps, plus the account operations the same specification names: sync accounts, report usage, pull delivery reporting. None of them is the client relationship. All of them sit right now with somebody on your payroll in Sydney or Melbourne.

The sector has spent two years arguing about whether AI will take agency jobs. It has quietly published a list of which ones.

What the mechanical layer costs a digital agency per head

The ABS Average Weekly Earnings release for May 2026 puts full-time adult ordinary time earnings in professional, scientific and technical services at $2,389.60 a week. That is $124,259 a year before superannuation, leave loading or a desk.

Two coordinators on that layer is $248,518 a year of payroll that never lands on a client invoice.

Sit with that number rather than the utilisation report. It is what you carry for work the industry has just certified as specifiable.

Does that figure overstate a coordinator?

It does. The same ABS division holds law, engineering and computer system design, and all three pull the average up. Use the all-industries figure of $2,083.70 a week and two heads is $216,704. The number moves by thirty grand. The shape does not.

The counter-argument that actually lands

An agency is a relationship business and that relationship is its only durable asset. Move client contact and you lose the account, usually inside a renewal cycle. Nobody sensible disputes it.

The stronger objection is the bench. The mechanical layer is where juniors learn the craft, and an agency that ships all of it abroad has nothing coming through in three years. ASIC’s own count of who sits in the back office found firms running whole functions on one trained person, the same fragility from the other direction.

Nobody in the sector has answered the bench question properly, and I would want it answered before moving the last of it.

Related reading

• The Junior Designer Your Agency Wants To Hire Does Not Exist
• Which Roles Should Go First? Start Where Demand Is Already Straining You

Draw the line on the invoice, not on the craft

Judgement against production was the 2024 answer, and what AI did to the production half of the marketing job has already been argued here. It is no longer a line you can resource against: the models took the production and left the judgement in the same salary band.

The line that holds is the invoice. An hour a client pays for stays near the client. An hour nobody bills can be done from another country by someone you employ properly, which is a decision about where your margin lives rather than a statement about anyone’s talent.

If you want to know what that layer costs you now, sign up and price one role against it. Or leave it alone, which is also a position.

A real question, and I would rather agency owners answered it than me. If the mechanical work is where juniors learn, and the standards bodies are coming for it anyway, what do you train the next cohort on?