An advertising agency or advert 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.
Ad agencies come in all sizes and include everything from one or two-person shops (which rely mostly on freelance talent to perform most functions), small- to medium-sized agencies such as Traction (agency), large independents such as SMART, and multi-national, multi-agency conglomerates such as Omnicom Group, WPP Group, Publicis, Interpublic Group of Companies, and Havas.
Advertising
Advertisers will have an increasing ability to reach specific audiences due to changes in digital technology.
Creative agencies specialize in creative or design-based business models; their basic interest is in the creation of the advertisement or branding. Other ("full-service") agencies offer design in conjunction with media buying. Media agencies concentrate on media buying. In the 1990s, media and creative were often unbundled in the interests of economies of scale in buying media.
The client who chooses to use a design-only advertising agency must assume some of the advertising purchasing. These are activities that are routinely handled by an agency with a media buying option. Media buying agencies are sometimes a good choice for larger businesses. These agencies can assume greater responsibility for the strategic planning and function of an advertising campaign. The advantage to a design-only agency is there is no third-party ordering the service. In turn, cost can be lower and is sometimes a good alternative for smaller businesses.
In addition to the full-service, general-line advertising agencies, there are also agencies that specialize in particular kinds of advertising: recruitment, help-wanted, medical, classified, industrial, financial, direct-response, retail, yellow pages, theatrical/entertainment, investment, travel, and so on.
Specialization occurs in such fields for a variety of reasons. Often, as in recruitment advertising, for example, specialized media or media uses are involved that require knowledge and expertise not ordinarily found in a general-line agency. In other cases, such as medical or industrial advertising, the subject is technical and requires that writers and artists have training in order to write meaningful advertising messages about it.
Such specialist advertising agencies are also usually full-service, in that they offer all of the basic advertising agency services in their area of specialization plus other, peripheral advertising services related to their area of specialization.
Some advertisers believe that they can provide these advertising services to themselves at a lower cost than would be charged by an outside agency. An In-House agency is a team that focuses on one goal to sell the company's product; they will handle all aspects of the brand. In-House is the better option if a company is looking to build up an image over a number of years and create continuity between all aspects of separate campaigns.
Due to the social networking explosion, new types of companies are doing reputation management. This type of agency is especially important if a company needs online damage control. For example, disgruntled customers can quickly and easily damage a company's reputation via social networking sites. Reputation management companies help stem the negative information or misinformation that might proliferate in their absence.
Social media agencies specialize in promotion of brands in various social media platforms like blogs, social networking sites, Q&A sites, discussion forums, microblogs etc. The two key services of social media agencies are social media marketing and online reputation management.
While not advertising agencies, enterprise technology agencies often work in tandem with advertising agencies to provide a specialized subset of services offered by some interactive agencies, such as Web 2.0 website design and development, content management systems, web application development, and other intuitive technology solutions for the web, mobile devices, and emerging digital platforms. The student-run advertising agency model, which mainly operates out of university classrooms or as a student groups, provides free advertising services to clients in exchange for the educational opportunity.