subject: Behind The Scenes At An Advertising Agency [print this page] Behind The Scenes At An Advertising Agency
If you are watching television at the moment the chances are good that in the next half hour or so you will be watching an advert made by an advertising agency and either marvelling at the concept or finding it ridiculous. Either way you'll be paying attention to the product being advertised and that is what lies of the core of what the advertising agency wants to achieve with the advert. Of course it is not only on the television that you see the myriad of products created in an advertising agency. You only have to drive a few kilometres on the highway near any major urban centre in South Africa to see the many billboards and signboards advertising a range of products from banks, to cellular phone companies, steak houses, slimming products and even government initiatives such as safe sex programmes aimed at lowering HIV/Aids transmission rates.
Given the size of the advertising industry it is no surprise that there is some degree of specialization and many different kinds of advertising agency. Because it is impossible for every advertising agency to be able to offer the whole spectrum of advertising services that its clients may require (due to various constraints on, for example, smaller companies) some companies offer limited service advertising. If you use a limited service advertising you may, hypothetically, have to take more responsibility for the strategic aspects of the process such as planning and exert more control over the actual product than you would if you handed over the entire job to one multi-service agency. A practical example is an advertising agency that only places advertisements in newspapers or magazines, leaving the client responsible for the actual creation of the advertisement. In this case the client can either go to another limited service advertising agency to create the actual advert, or if, for example it is only a text advert, create the advert themselves.
Within the advertising agency itself there are lots of different kinds of work going on and not only the obvious things such as a creative team of copywriters and art directors coming up with new media campaigns and advertising ideas that they collaborate on with the design or production departments. An advertising agency has to run smoothly just like any other business, no matter how creative it is, and there is a range of core and essential functions that still have to be performed in order to get the job done. For example, one of the less glamorous jobs in an advertising agency is performed by the media services department which is responsible for mundane matters such as making sure that the agency has enough supplies and negotiating with printers to make sure enough pamphlets can be printed on deadline. They often have to focus on budgetary constraints and practical deadlines that are as essential to pleasing the client as the advertising campaign itself. Another part of an advertising agency that is rarely heard of is the traffic department, which is quite literally in charge of regulating the flow of work into and out of the advertising agency.
