I was speaking recently with a head of digital at a leading company in New Zealand, and we compared notes on how agencies actually run their work. His experience matched mine. Behind the polished tools, a surprising number of leading advertising and marketing agencies run their projects on Google Sheets.
It sounds like a failure of imagination until you watch it work. A sheet is instant, everyone already knows it, it costs nothing, and it bends to whatever shape the account team needs that month. No vendor onboarding, no per seat pricing, no features nobody asked for.
There is also honesty in it. A sheet does not pretend to be a methodology. It is a list of things, who owns them and when they are due, which is most of what project management is.
Where it breaks
Sheets break when you need reminders, dependencies, permissions or a history of changes. They break quietly, a stale row here, a missed date there, and by the time you notice, the client has noticed first.
The lesson is not that agencies should stay on spreadsheets. It is that the barrier to entry matters. If your tool is harder to update than a sheet, people will keep a shadow sheet, and the shadow sheet becomes the truth.
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