The Lowdown on Advertising Agencies

by The Advertopedia Staff

Advertising agencies are companies that work to create, design, and place advertisements and plan and execute promotional campaigns for their clients. Agencies are divided into two basic types, full-service and limited-service. A full-service agency deals with all aspects of the advertising process from conception to placement and may also handle other marketing tasks such as market research, package design, direct marketing, and public relations. A limited-service agency will focus on a particular area or set of areas, such as message development. While the one-stop-shopping convenience of a full-service agency is attractive and may be beneficial, particularly for large companies with many advertising campaigns to coordinate, a smaller limited-service agency may offer lower rates and particular expertise in its area of focus.

Whatever its range of services, any agency has the goal of getting consumers’ attention and influencing their feelings regarding their client’s product, service, or cause. Agencies must adapt to work with each client’s particular needs and goals within the available budget. The core of an agency is the creative department—the copywriters who develop the text or script for an ad and the art directors who design the look of the ad. Copywriters and art directors often work as a team, either on a long-term basis or partnered up project-by-project. Teams usually report to a creative director, who is a senior staff person with several years of experience in creating campaigns. Account services staff are responsible for creating and maintaining relationships with clients, ensuring that their needs are understood and that the creative department is meeting them.

The aim of any creative team is to create an advertisement or campaign that will convince consumers to buy their client’s product. There are several basic techniques that advertising agencies use to persuade the consumer: association (our beer = beaches full of beautiful models), bandwagon (everybody else is buying it!), catchy slogans, controversy, pressure (buy now, while supplies last!), repetition, and testimonials. These techniques may be combined in a variety of ways, with some ads occasionally seeking to use almost all of them. Determining which techniques will be most effective is largely dependent upon what kind of product is being advertised, who the target audience is, and what kind of image the advertiser wants to project. Selling a luxury item usually depends at least partly on the snobbery of the consumer, so the bandwagon approach would not be effective. Using an ad that generates controversy can appeal to the young and rebellious, so it has been effective in selling jeans and cologne, but an advertiser of life insurance policies would probably avoid it.

A primary goal of any advertising campaign is building brand awareness, i.e. the public familiarity with a particular brand and the ability to distinguish it from its competitors. Brand awareness is built through developing a distinctive look, particularly in the logo and packaging, and promoting the product in a way that consistently defines its particular brand identity while also promoting its benefit or desirability. Brand awareness is essential for a product to have long-term success; without it, the product will quickly be lost among the variety of other products that are more actively seeking the consumer’s attention.

The earliest agencies could not have conceived of the range of services (or, indeed, of media outlets) available through agencies today. When they first began to appear, late in the 18^th Century, agencies existed only to broker deals for space in newspapers and magazines between their publishers and the companies that wanted to advertise in them. Over time, they became more involved in actually designing the advertisements. A fuller range of services developed and advertising became a recognized course of study in colleges and universities, with its own theory and extensive research. Professional organizations for advertisers were formed, offering their members helpful services and establishing professional standards. Meanwhile, the development of radio, television, and interstate highways (a perfect location for large-scale billboard advertisements) offered a growing variety of venues. And this is the way things were for a number of years, as the craft of advertising became more sophisticated but access points remained pretty much static.

In the 1990s, though, the growth of the Internet as a place both to advertise and to directly buy and sell products changed the nature of advertising just as it did many other aspects of commerce. Many full-service agencies developed Internet divisions and limited-service agencies sprang up that dealt exclusively in online advertising. But perhaps the greatest change the Internet has wrought is in the way it has put so many tools into the hands of advertisers that allow them to develop their own advertisements without bringing in an agency. As more consumers are spending time online and more advertisers are discovering the benefits of Internet advertising, software for developing one’s own ads becomes increasingly sophisticated and easy to use, creating a threat to existing advertising agencies. For most businesses, internet advertising is not enough by itself (even websites sometimes advertise on television and in print), but the change in the market and the possibility of further technological advances mean that the future of advertising agencies is uncertain.

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