Partisan Advertising

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The Role of Advertising Agencies

Knowing the role of advertising agencies in your business is crucial. These days advertisers and marketers are spoilt for choice for advertising agencies, so how do you know which advertising agency is right for you?

There is, at hand, a range of advertising agencies and advertising services to benefit, just about, any business or non-profit.

 
In this blog, we take a non-partisan look at:

  • The types of advertising agencies

  • The services advertising agencies may provide, including:

  1. Strategy planning and development

  2. Research

  3. Brand campaign and development

  4. Media planning

  5. Advertising production

  6. Testing and measurement

The types of advertising agencies

When advertising agencies first came on the scene, they were most often a group of individuals with the sole aim of selling space in periodicals from which they received a commission.

Then the more enterprising of those salesmen (they were nearly all men) provided a further incentive by offering to produce creative content to fill that space. Often that meant special writers (copywriters) and artists were being employed by the salesman to design and make the ads.

The advent of the modern advertising agency was with us and largely stayed that way in New Zealand until 1966, when a small boat slipped its mooring and fled out to the Hauraki Gulf and started broadcasting as Radio Hauraki. That turned the agency-world upside down.

It meant that with more media choices, media selection became a specialist craft rather than a function of the account executive whose previous options were mainly restricted to government television, government radio, the Listener (for a time), or whichever newspaper best reflected the desired demographic.

The range of services advertising agencies offered expanded exponentially. Even so, the advertising agencies back then bear little resemblance to today’s advertising agencies.

Today, you can have a bespoke advertising agency to fit your exact needs. They range from full-service agencies, often but not always large and global, to smaller companies such as those specialising in digital media, social media, creative boutiques, or media buying.

Each has a role. How to select which you need and which type of agency suits you best warrants another blog – and it will get one.

But let’s look at the roles full-service agencies can offer because that’s what Partisan offers—and, no, we are neither large nor global. You’ll remember that we listed those roles above. But what do they mean?

1. Strategy planning and development

A properly constituted advertising agency can pay real dividends for you here. Few advertising campaigns can be successful if they don’t have a prescribed strategy. That strategy should include brand positioning, brand equity (the attributes you wish to ascribe to your brand), point of difference, timing, and even price points. The fact is that none of these aspects should be constructed in isolation or governed by personal bias.

The real value of employing an agency to do the work for you is that they will approach the task from an unbiased point of view with the marketing knowledge, experience, and resources that augment and enhance your core role as a business.

2. Research

This service should perhaps come before strategy development because research into your market and perceived demographics will govern so much of your strategy. An advertising agency knows what it needs to know to construct a compelling and persuasive message for you.

Allow them to go out to the market for you. They know what questions to ask to enable them to do their job for you, and whilst they won’t necessarily do the research themselves (few agencies do), they will know which research companies to employ and what questions to ask to get the information they and you need to know before creating a campaign.

3. Brand campaign and development

It’s a staple of advertising agencies. That is not to diminish the other services a full-service advertising agency offers, but creating the brand and building a campaign around it is what an advertising agency does best—it’s also the exciting part. And here is a little Partisan secret for you that most advertising agencies won’t tell you—you must be involved in that process.

You have a role to play working with the agency, particularly the creative team, that crafts a compelling message reflecting the values and aspirations you have for your product or service. Get yourself an agency that makes you part of the team. Your involvement will enhance the campaign, and—believe us—you’ll have a lot of fun.

4. Media Planning

A good media planner can take all the guesswork out of media planning and help you choose where to advertise so that you get the biggest return for your buck which can be the difference between winning and losing.

And that's the role of a media planner. They can help you make better choices that are tailored to your business, and to your budget. A good one will make you question your current assumptions about locations, sizes, and frequency. It might even mean that you don't run traditional advertising for a while if it isn't the most economical option. This is true whether you're spending $1,000 or $100,000.

5. Advertising production

This is the sweatshop of the advertising agency world. And we don’t mean that in a derogatory manner. It’s simply the part of the process where a good agency, armed with a clear visionary strategy, research, resources, and experience, will hunker down and get those ads and other messaging done and out.

It’s also the part of the process that you need to allow your agency the freedom to get on with the job. All the strategising, research, and brainstorming (all of which, as we said, should involve you) has been done at this point; now is the time to allow the agency to get on with their job… and deliver.

6. Testing and measurement

How successful was the campaign? There are many ways to measure that. The most obvious are product sales or service uptake, and you might be satisfied with just the in-house figures you are getting.

But one question remains unanswered: could you have done better? And that is why ongoing testing is essential for the agency and you. It enables the campaign and the core message to be adapted, nuanced, and optimised. But it’ll happen only if you have your agency find out what’s going on out there.

I’ll give you an example. I have a son who, as a toddler, was the sole performer in a 60 second TV commercial for a wallpaper company. He became famous. He was recognised and stopped on the street. Everybody knew the ad or had seen the ad. The problem was that all those people attributed the ad to the wrong brand! “Are you the little boy in the Ashley Wallpaper commercial?” they asked–“No,” was the reply.

The ad was for Vision Wallpaper. The market leader (Ashley Wallpaper), not the brand my son was helping promote, was taking all the kudos–and sales. Measurement and testing would have picked that up; it’s a wise investment, and your agency should be amenable to it. Accountability is the key.

There are other things an agency can do for you. A good agency, anyway. But if you are looking to optimise and get the best benefit from your advertising agency, think about this—maybe the best role they can have is to be part of your team and for you to be part of theirs: to develop a partnership where common goals and communication are frequent and fundamental. You and your agency are onto a winner if you get that going.