Advertising Agency
“The work of a tailor is to collect the raw material, find matching threads, cut the cloth in desired shape, finally stitch the cloth and deliver it to the customer.” Advertising Agency is just like a tailor. It creates the ads, plans how, when and where it should be delivered and hands it over to the client. Advertising agencies are mostly not dependent on any organizations. These agencies take all the efforts for selling the product of the clients. They have a group of people expert in their particular fields, thus helping the companies or organizations to reach their target customer in an easy and simple way. The first Advertising Agency was William Taylor in 1786 followed by James “Jem” White in 1800 in London.
Meaning and Definition of Advertising Agency
Whenever an advertiser will get affected the most positive or negative it’s the advertising agency that plays the greatest role in creating the impact of the advertisement. In other word, the advertising agency is responsible for the degree of the effectiveness of the advertisement the outcome of which will make or break the brand.
The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) defines “Ad Agency as an independent business organisation, composed of creative and business people, who develop and prepare and place advertising media for sellers for their goods and services”.
Functions of Advertising Agencies
Today advertising agencies are found in virtually every major city on the world and their role in stimulating economic growth is solidly established. To understand advertising, we need to examine the functions of an Ad Agency.
- Talent & Creative productions: The basic function of an Ad Agency is providing talent. A business organization or person will contract the services of an ad agency to help market a product. This function involves processing the information collected from the client and through research and designing communication material in the form of advertisements and other publicity material. This also includes planning creative strategies, script writing, visualization, designing, layout, shooting of films, editing, giving music, etc.
- Research: In order to distribute the message to the public successfully, the agency must first know all that it can about the product. One of the first jobs is to research the product and the company. The research must even take one close to the heart of the firm’s inner operations. Ad agencies use research as a tool to test consumer reactions to products and services.
- Distribution & Media planning: Here you decide what type of message you will create for the company and what media will be most helpful in sending this message to the public. On the basis of the media habits of the target audience, agency people prepare a media plan. This plan includes which media to be used, which part of the media to be used, when to place the ads and for how long to place the ads, etc. media planners keep track of the viewer ship, listener ship and readership of all kinds of media.
- Monitoring Feedback: By monitoring consumer feedback, a decision on whether to revise the message, the medium, the target audience or all of them can be made. As information is the backbone of all advertising, to prepare ads, one requires information about the product; its competitors, the market situation and trends.
Why do they need advertising agencies?
- They work with an objective and are very professionals.
- Hiring them leads in saving the costs up to some extent.
- The agencies make optimum use of these people, their experience and their knowledge.
- The agencies are expert in this field. They have a team of different people for different functions like, art directors, planners, etc.
Role of Advertising Agencies
- Creating an advertise on the basis of information gathered about product
- Doing research on the company and the product and reactions of the customers.
- Planning for type of media to be used, when and where to be used, and for how much time to be used.
- Taking the feedbacks from the clients as well as the customers and then deciding the further line of action.
Types of Advertising Agencies
- Full-service agency – A full agency is usually large in size and offers their clients a full range of services such as copywriting, artwork, production of ads, media planning etc. it may also provide marketing consultancy services in respect of pricing, distribution, packaging, product design etc. Trikaya, Grey, Ogilvy and Mather are full-service agencies in India
- Large size agencies.
- Deals with all stages of advertisement.
- Different expert people for different departments.
- Starts work from gathering data and analyzing and ends on payment of bills to the media people.
- Modular Agency - It is a full-service agency that sells its services on piece meal basis. It may provide only creative services to an advertiser. The advertiser avails other service from elsewhere. Fees are changed for actual work undertaken.
- Interactive Agencies – Modernized modes of communication are used. Uses online advertisements, sending personal messages on mobile phones, etc. The ads produced are very interactive, having very new concepts, and very innovative.
- Creative Boutique – It is a type agency that provides only creative function and not full service. The specialized creative function including copywriting, art work and production of ads. They charge fees or percentage of the media expenditure.
- Very creative and innovative ads.
- No other function is performed other than creating actual ads.
- Small sized agencies with their own copywriters, directors, and creative people.
- Global and Local Agency – Agencies can also be classified as global and local agencies. The global agencies have branches or offices worldwide. E.g., WPP group, and O & M have offices in over 100 countries across the globe. There are also local ad agencies that operates only to local markets e.g., Bright
- Mega Agency – Mega Agency refer to merger of the agencies worldwide. In 1986, Saachi & Saachi agency started such merger and at presents it is 3rd largest agency network in the world. Due to their size and global operations, mega agencies are in a position to serve the clients in a better way.
- Media buying Agency – These are independent agencies specializing in media services. Agencies offering this service buy large amount of time and space in media. They sell this time and space to their clients. For the services rendered they are paid a commission or fees by the advertiser.
- Buys place for advertise and sells it to the advertisers.
- Sells time in which advertisement will be placed.
- Schedules slots at different television channels and radio stations.
- Finally supervises or checks whether the ad has been telecasted at opted time and place or not.
- Specialist agency – there are some agencies who undertaking ad work only in certain areas or category of product. Foe example some agencies specialize in financial services, social advertising, medicine related advertising and so on. DAVP (Directorate of advertising visual publicity is a specialist agency which gives publicity to government policies and Programmes.
- In house agencies – At times, an advertiser may establish his own department to perform the ad related services which are normally provided by outside agency. Such a department is known as an in-house agency. It is owned and operated by the advertiser. Large advertiser such as Calvin Klien and Benetton use in house agencies
- As good as the full-service agencies.
- Big organization prefers these types of agencies which are in built and work only for them.
- These agencies work as per the requirements of the organizations.
There are some specialized agencies which work for some special advertisements. These types of agencies need people of special knowledge in that field. For example, advertisements showing social messages, finance advertisements, medicine related ads, etc.
