ADVERTISING AGENCY

WHAT IS ADVERTISING AGENCY?

An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising (and sometimes other forms of promotion) for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services. An agency can also handle overall marketing and branding strategies and sales promotions for its clients. Typical ad agency clients include businesses and corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies. Agencies may be hired to produce an advertising campaign.

The major role as advertising agency is to work alongside the clients to develop and sustain the brands that they mutually serve, through consumer understanding and insight and through creative and media delivery skills to provide best advice and the best execution thereof to those clients for the advertising of those brands.

“Buildings age and become dilapidated. Machines wear out. People die. But what live on are the brands.”

Brands are much more than mere products and services. Brands, if successful, are clearly differentiated entities with which consumers can and do form a mutually beneficial relationship over time, because of the values – rational and emotional, physical and aesthetic – that consumers derive from them. The importance can be summed up as follows:

” A product is something that is made, in a factory: a brand is something that is bought, by a customer. A competitor can copy a product; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly out-dated; a successful brand is timeless.”

The role of advertising and the advertising agency is to help effect this transformation from product or service to brand by clearly positioning the offering to the consumer – its role and its benefits – and by communicating the brand’s own personality. In short its role is to provide meaningful differentiation via the consumer connection. As one wise head in advertising once said, “nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising”. Typically advertising is playing this role, along with other parts of what we call the marketing mix, in highly competitive market places.

Most advertisers assign this job of informing the target audience and creating images to advertising agencies. Thus, the advertising agencies plan, prepare and place ads in the media. But even an advertiser can do all these things. The management can do planning of ad campaigns. For preparing ads, creative personal can be hires. And the advertiser for placing the ads can buy media space or time.