Advertising and publicity services

As consumers, we’re used to advertising messages coming at in many different formats: TV, online, social media feeds, billboards, radio, print—you name it.

For businesses and organizations, creative advertising is a powerful—and often essential tool—to build brands, make sales, raise awareness, and create competitive differentiation that can turn merely surviving as a business into thriving.

To help you understand what an advertising agency is all about, including what they do and how they can benefit businesses, we provide the following information and insights:

What is an advertising agency?

A traditional ad agency or digital marketing agency provides advertising services, media, marketing communications, public relations (PR), event organization, and other services to help businesses and organizations raise awareness, sell products and services, and create dynamic brands.

Some of their other main functions include:

• Doing market research. While an advertising company supplies creative services to produce campaigns, their work is also data-driven and based on market research, ensuring that they target their efforts properly to be effective.
• Planning and budgeting advertising. An advertising or larger marketing campaign can have many moving parts that take careful planning to ensure the campaign runs smoothly and within budget.
• Selecting media. In their work, creative agencies have a wide range of media to consider, including TV, print, interactive, social media advertising, billboards, point of purchase (POP), direct marketing, and many others. Not only must the right media be selected for a campaign, but the marketing agency also needs to reserve ad space and negotiate pricing.
• Coordinating multichannel marketing campaigns. Multichannel marketing integrates different channels—social media, blogs, email, TV, mobile, and streaming services—to reach customers everywhere they are, to achieve the client’s objectives and increase conversion rates.
• Integrating marketing efforts. Many campaigns require advertising agencies to coordinate efforts across departments, suppliers, and partners. For example, a digital advertising company may use a digital campaign to support a product launch, which would also require event management and PR services to get press coverage.

Common ad agency services

Advertising agencies come in different types. Whether they are a specialized boutique or full-service advertising agency, creative firms usually provide a wide range of services, including:

Ad campaigns

Advertising campaigns are a set of linked ads that focus on conveying a single brand message. Creative directors and their creative teams of art directors and copywriters produce campaigns to meet specific client business or awareness goals, often generating sales leads and conversions.

To create the campaign, an agency works on a specific strategy that is often a product of client input, market research, and creative brainstorming. Running a large campaign across many advertising media platforms is common.

In the hands of the agency creative team, the “Just do it” tagline became an inspirational rally cry for amateur and professional athletes around the world. It has been used as the centerpiece of commercials, billboards, posters, print ads, merchandise, event signage, and other sundry parts of ad campaigns that helped turn Nike into one of the world’s major sporting goods brands. And its rallying cry is still heard today.

Social media management

As social media consumption increases, so does the importance of marketing to audiences through their chosen platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, and others.

Online marketing could include display or pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media ads, social media influencers, targeted content, and more. Social media management is often part of a larger digital marketing strategy, which could include:

• Mobile apps
• Blogs
• Website content
• Email campaigns
• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Inbound/outbound marketing campaigns

Content creation

As consumers become more resistant to straight-out advertising messages, they often need to be wooed by soft sells like those delivered through targeted content, found in blogs, site content, social media posts, and much more. This is also considered content marketing.

Advertising firms and content agencies, often working hand in hand with SEO professionals, will create content, like landing pages on your site, according to different stages of the sales or marketing funnel: hooking interest and winning trust at first, and then converting to paid customers later.

Graphic design

Graphic design is an essential service offered by advertising agencies or provided by design partners or suppliers. It is the practical art of creating visual concepts—by computer or hand—intended to communicate concepts that inspire, inform, and captivate consumers.

Graphic design can be seen in everything from company logos to display ad and publication designs to websites that are pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate, and function well. The importance of design goes beyond graphics to cover online user experience, 3D and product design, software design, game design, and more.

Strategic planning

An advertising strategy provides an overview of and broad direction for a campaign, setting measurable objectives to ensure everything stays on track during execution. It outlines an ad project’s goals, how you will achieve them, who will do the work, and what metrics are used to determine success.

Because strategic planners must pay close attention to the target audience, they’re often considered the “voice of the consumer” by the ad agency team. The duties of a strategic planner include liaising with other departments, aligning advertising and business goals, creating campaign calendars, and allotting budgets.

TV/web/radio commercials

Traditionally, broadcast commercials for TV and radio had a much bigger place in the hearts of advertising agencies because their budgets and the attention received were much greater than traditional print vehicles.

With ubiquitous high-speed internet connections, videos are increasingly important online marketing vehicles, often gaining more interest than simple picture-and-text posts. An agency often has to differentiate its approach between traditional broadcast and online commercials.

With network TV, for example, viewers expect to see commercials and receive direct advertising messages. Online, however, people go to sites for specific purposes and expect any videos they watch will give them the information they need or answer a question they have.

Online advertising usually costs less than traditional broadcast ads and offers the potential to reach a wider audience, but it must contend with a very competitive landscape.