Advertising Agency Types, Structure & Services

Types of Advertising Agencies

There are many ways to classify advertising agencies. They can be classified according to:

• Scope: National and International
• Type of service they offer:
  • Advertising agencies proper.
  • Full-Service Agencies, Creative Boutiques.
  • Media Agencies
  • Specialized agencies (Promotions, Direct Marketing, Viral Marketing, Public Relations, Press Office, etc.).
  • Exclusive Agencies

Services Offered by Agencies

Agencies can offer all or some of the following services:

• Creativity: This is the core of their service, their reason for being.
• Marketing consultancy.
• Complementary services: promotional communication, direct marketing, merchandising, events, etc.
• Management of audiovisual, graphic, and event production.
• Planning and buying media.
• International coordination.

Key Accounts or Client Services

• Relationship with the client.
• Action planning, supervision, and evaluation.
• Ultimate responsibility to the client and to the management.
• Customer acquisition, "sale" of Agency and Projects.
• Negotiation of economic conditions, team, and timings.
• Operational Planning
• Distribution of work and determination of execution times.
• Definition and monitoring of administrative aspects.

Agency Structure

Creativity

• Creative Direction
  • IDEA generation.
  • Tone of communication, style.
• Writing
  • Claim/slogan/brand closing
  • Texts in general
• Art Direction: Visualization of the idea.
  • Sketches
  • Definition of common graphic lines
  • Parameter definition for external work (production, photography, illustration).
• Studio: Execution of originals (final arts) for graphic production.

Strategic Planning

• Orientation of the client's work, providing the necessary information (market, advertising, competition, etc.).
• Analysis of brand image, attributes of the product or brand, comparative positioning, and consumer segmentation.
• Generation of a concept, creative briefing: the translation from marketing to advertising.

Market Research

• In many cases, it belongs to strategic planning.
• Advertising research
• Market research (competition, product, brand, consumers, etc.). Usually, a commercial research company handles this.

Traffic

• Operational control: start, end, timings, billing.
• Increasingly an Accounts and/or Production function.

Production

• Search and approval of audiovisual and graphic suppliers.
• Negotiating with suppliers and budgets.
• Order production according to parameters.
• Usually, there is an audiovisual division and a graphic division.
• Depending on the agency and discipline, this is a function of Creative and/or Accounts.