Everyone at ZING creatives has at least one experience and difficulty in explaining just what a creative ad agency is.
When we say “I work for a creative ad agency,” at parties, dinners or to newly introduced conversation partners. We are commonly faced with blank looks, a slight nod, or even the occasional “huh?” in our dialogues.
We do understand that a creative ad agency can be difficult to make sense of at first. It is a field that is full of jargons and has a tremendous variety of platforms and formats that can make it confusing on where to focus one’s attention.
So to start your journey in understanding this field, we will be providing you a bird’s eye view over the current creative ad agency landscape. You’ll get an overview of how they function including how they integrate their customer’s journey and experience in order to create effective advertising and marketing campaigns.
With those goals in mind, it’s time to break down just what a creative ad agency is and also to help set the right expectations for anyone thinking of stepping into the creative market.
WHAT IS A CREATIVE AD AGENCY?
An advertising agency uses different marketing and promotional channels in order to create campaigns and strategies that can increase the client’s revenue and brand awareness.
Advertising agencies use mediums from TV, radio, podcasts, and other out of home advertising such as billboards and others. But by throwing “creative” into the mix, this ensures that all the marketing materials are appealing to the target audience while also maximizing results and customer engagement.
Now, advertising agencies can range in size and can be formed from small teams, to being an independent freelancer, or to large franchises.
But in a nutshell, a creative ad agency is a company that spends its working hours crafting effective, artistic, and engaging work for brands and businesses.
It is made up of a careful, and if not, precise blend of designers, developers, content specialists, PR ‘gurus’ and digital marketing coaches and experts. And it is considered as a powerhouse of creative talents where there is never a shortage of applicable ideas that will surely help a business grow.
And these creative ad agencies typically focus their efforts on these following areas:
- Strategy: How does a business serve its customers and generate income
- Design: How does a business and its product appeal to their audiences
- Technology: How does a business make use of technological solutions into their processes
- Advertising: How does a business market their brand, products and services to their customers.
And each of these roles have their corresponding team leaders and members that are qualified for the service that the creative ad agency provides. Here are some of the most common roles in a creative ad agency:
- Designers: They are a part of the creative department, and they are in-charge of producing creative outputs that can be used as advertisements in websites, mobile apps and others.
- Creative Directors: They oversee the work of designers and ensure that deliverables meet or even exceed the client’s standards.
- Accounts Representative: These are the persons who will be working closely with the clients and understand their business and goals, they will research and share the clients needs and vision with the creative department.
- Researchers: Creative content requires much brainstorming and research. These professionals will be the ones to investigate existing and future market trends and will assist clients in making more informed decisions.
The creative team is made up of the key members as stated above. They are the professionals that come up with the advertising ideas and bring them to fruition.
Although we do admit that some of these titles will have varying job descriptions among different organizations since some of duties and roles may overlap with each other. Such as an advertising manager could be both a creative director and graphic designer and so on.
But overall, their primary objective is to create a desire for the public to consume. And to build brand awareness and image that pertains to how the company actually wants to be known by their customers.
Three Main Types of Creative Agencies
Now, there are three main types of creative agencies: Digital, Print, and Advertising. Although they do have certain similarities, each creative agency has their own focus on the online market.
For digital agencies, they are known as experts of designing websites, graphic illustrations and videos. Practically anything that encourages the customers to fall in love with a brand. They are also arguably more trendy than the print based agencies since they are an ever-changing online landscape.
For print based agencies, they are the masters of designing book covers, vinyl, and catalogues. They are the professionals you can turn to when looking to create media kits, pop-up banners, and packaging and they are extremely adept with using software related to Adobe photoshop and InDesign to present their layouts.
Lastly, for Creative Ad Agencies, we turn to them when we want to create advertisements that can help get the brand out and capture the public’s eye. You can expect that these types of creative agencies will have experience with both the print and digital creatives.
But at its roots, it is simply a design company that uses their skills to churn out artistic concepts for print, scanning, and uploading to websites and other platforms.