Organizing for Advertising and Promotion: The Role of Ad Agencies and Other Marketing Communication Organizations - Part 2

In this section we will review the various Ad agencies in detail:

An advertising agency assists the organizations in developing, preparing, and executing their promotional programs. An ad agency is a service organization that specializes in planning and executing advertising programs for its clients. The organizations go for these sorts of agencies because of the expert resources that are available with these agencies as shown in the image. The agencies have access to artists, writers, researchers, analysts, photographers and other skilled personnel who are experts in their own fields and some even for specific industries such as Mentus Inc. is an agency that specializes in integrated marketing communications for the high-technology, e-commerce, and bioscience industries. An outside agency can also provide an objective viewpoint of the market and its business that is not subject to internal company policies, biases, or other limitations. For Example, Crispin Porter + Bogusky advertised the Mini in the following way:

Types of Ad Agencies:

• Full Services Agencies: The full-service agency is made up of departments that provide the activities needed to perform the various advertising functions and serve the client, as shown in the figure.

• Account Services

Account services, or account management, are the link between the ad agency and its clients. Depending on the size of the client and its advertising budget, one or more account executives serve as liaison. The account executive is responsible for understanding the advertiser’s marketing and promotions needs and interpreting them to agency personnel.

Other Services Provided:

Other lesser known type of agencies:

Creative Boutiques: A creative boutique is an agency that provides only creative services. These specialized companies have developed in response to some clients’ desires to use only the creative talent of an outside provider while maintaining the other functions internally. The client may seek outside creative talent because it believes an extra creative effort is required or because its own employees do not have sufficient skills in this regard. The special features are: 

• Provides only creative services
• May be sub contracted by the full service agencies
• Ability to turn out inventive creative work quickly

Media Specialist Companies:

• Specializes in buying media, especially broadcast time
• Agencies and clients develop media strategies
• Media buying agencies are responsible for implementing the strategy and buying time and space

Methods of compensation for agencies:

There are three major mechanisms for compensating an agency which are:

Losing Clients?

The following are some of the reasons that result in ad agencies losing out clients:

 Gaining New Clients:

Activities performed by Specialist Marketing Firms:

Should you go for integrated communication services then?

Pros

• Greater synergies
• Convenience
• Single unified image for product and service

Cons

• Budget Politics
• Poor communication
• Lack of synergy 

Why are companies unable to implement an IMC plan properly?