Advertising Agencies
What are Advertising Agencies?
Advertising agencies are businesses’ partner in developing an effective marketing advertisement for their product. Aside from designing and building ads, advertising agencies also provide other marketing services, such as branding, positioning, sales promotion and marketing advice.
Account Planning Tools Workshop 2008
Choosing the Right Advertising Agency
Finding the right advertising agency can help you develop an effective marketing strategy that attracts your target audience and increase your sales. There are currently more than a hundred advertising agencies in the market, so choosing the right one would be quite difficult. When selecting an agent to work with you, take in mind that a big advertising agency is not always the best. But this does not mean that you sign into contract whoever offer you the lowest advertising bid. Before you go about choosing the right agency, Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the best-selling marketing series Guerrilla Marketing, suggest that you consider the following questions:
- What do we need from an agency: help in planning, researching, creating, producing, picking media, all of these, or none of these?
- Should the ad agency handle the media buying, should we use a media-buying service, or should we do it ourselves?
- Will the agency be compensated solely by the commission it earns on the media it purchases and the added commission it earns on production, or will you pay a flat fee that includes all services?
- Are we picking an agency because we want a specific kind of advertising campaign or because it’s the best agency?
- How important is it that we have regular and unlimited access to the president of the agency we select?
- Does the agency have quantifiable prowess in direct marketing and the Internet since they so closely tie in with marketing?
- Do we require an agency to handle only our existing advertising, or our new-product launches and grand openings as well?
- Does the location of the ad agency matter to us?
- Although we have the ultimate say-so in what advertising runs, who will really be in charge of advertising decisions - someone at our place or theirs?
- Finally, do we love both the work done by the agency and the results it has achieved?