Understanding Roles in Advertising

Note to Mentors

Please help edit this wiki page with any content that feels right to you. Contribute your knowledge to this wiki by adding things that you feel students should learn in order to attain an understanding of this unit. Add examples, case studies or exercise ideas where appropriate. Don’t worry too much about formatting of this wiki page. Our curators will tidy this page every 24 hours.

Unit Purpose and Aims

The purpose of this unit is to;

The aim of this unit is to equip the student with an understanding of what it is like to be a creative in an agency. To understand what typical activities a creative undertakes and what their responsibilities are and what happens over a typical agency day. they will also explore how partner companies interface with them.

Learning Outcomes

Learners will;

1.  Understand what the role of an agency creative consists of

Learners can;

1.1 Compare and contrast  the typical responsibilities of an agency creative and those of a client services executive, explain why the roles have evolved as they have.

1.2 Compare and contrast  the typical tasks of an agency creative over the lifetime of a project and describe the different inputs that each role has form external sources.

SCA 2.0 Agency visits from Arvid Härnqvist on Vimeo.

1.3 Explain  the typical reporting structure for a creative and why it has evolved into this format.

2. Understand the different roles that exist in agencies and brands.

2.1 Critically compare and contrast the hierarchies and job roles within an ad agency, media agency and marketing agency.

2.2  Describe the structure of a marketing department in a large brand

3.  Understand the different roles within a range of partner companies for agencies.

3.1 Explain typical partner companies and their functions

3.2 Explain how they manage relationships with ad agencies, what the processes are, who manages these processes and why it works the way it does.

3.3 Research and Explain the business ecology surrounding an agency and its partners with particular reference to why agencies sometimes take services  in house and sometimes don’t.

 

Learning Tools, Resources & Links

Things that will help the learner develop understanding of this unit;

Mentors  please add your ideas, examples, case studies, links to articles, videos, etc. here.

 

——

Here is an interesting Q&A session with Russel Davies, who previously held a planner’s position at W+K and is now Global Planning Director for Nike, one of W+K’s clients. His answers show you pretty well what a planner does and how he or she thinks (well that comes down to the individual, but just in general). Have a look here. If you have less time read Alex post about what strategic planners do.

Very much fun, yet absolutely spot on is McCann Erickson’s description of roles in advertising. Have a read and laugh.

Here is a very detailed description of what art directors do, however, don’t forget that good teams take weight off each other’s shoulders by suggestions how to better the work.

Watch

and read the book if you want to get to know a slightly different approach towards understanding and interpreting the roles in advertising. The agency described in the book is rumoured to be TBWA Paris.

————————–

By the AD CONTRARIAN. An insight on how IDEAS are being overturned by concerns for money and facts. Creative freedom is tied to its knees with people who has different agendas in the agency.

JANUARY 31, 2011

Torturing The Data

If, like me, you are required to sit through a great many advertising and marketing presentations, I am pretty sure you’ve noticed something. These meetings have become far less about ideas and far more about numbers.
The advertising industry is trying its best to shed itself of the one thing that made it valuable and interesting — ideas — and become as one with its clients.

Before I dig myself a hole here, let me say that there is an important place for numbers in advertising. As a former science teacher, I have a very large bias toward basing advertising decisions on facts.

However, in a large percentage of meetings I attend, facts are not used to enlighten. They are used to confuse or mislead. This is done in two ways:

1. Using data disingenuously.

2. Using data without proper perspective.

This has always been true to some degree in traditional advertising. It is alarmingly true in the world of digital advertising.

The strategy often employed is to torture the facts until a piece of data that looks impressive on the surface can be squeezed out of it. Then it is presented out of context.

For example, while making a pitch for online display advertising, you will often hear a planner or digital media guru make a statement like this –

“According to Nielsen, 60% of people surveyed said they had clicked on a banner ad in the past 30 days.”

On the surface, this “fact” seems substantial. Then you realize how many thousands of ads are served each month to the average person, and how it only takes one click to get over this threshold. Here are some more things that are wrong with the above statement:

1. Who was surveyed? Unless you know who the sample is, the statement is meaningless. The statement says “people” were surveyed. What people? People online? People in Cupertino? People with unintended click disorder?

2. It is self-reported. Most self-reported data is nonsense. The only way to get a true number is to measure actual behavior.

3. It blatantly and intentionally disregards the key fact. The key fact about clicking is that only one served display ad in a thousand gets clicked on. Any  discussion of display advertising click rates that does not start with this fact is intentionally deceitful.

One of the key tricks of this type of deceit is the cynical use of mathematical terms instead of plain English.  Ask the planner or online guru what the click-through rate is for Facebook ads and the answer you will get is “point-0-2.” The purpose of answering this way is obfuscation. It is a lot less clear to say “point-0-2″ than it is to say “2 in ten thousand.”

Another disturbing part of the numbers-oriented presentations I see is the lack of perspective. Slide after slide of charts and graphs are shown without an ounce of perspective on what they mean. It reminds me of what the financial industry must have been like before the crash of 2008.

They had incomprehensibly complex formulas for derivatives and other financial instruments, and no idea at all what these numbers really meant or where the formulas lead.

Anyone foolish enough to think that our digital gurus understand more about their metrics than the PhD’s on Wall Street knew about theirs, deserves everything he gets.

 

—–

Understand the difference between a graphic designer and an art director.

What graphic designers do can be read here. An art director defines rather more who is working on what at which time to bring together the communication. He or she “directs the art”, meaning that the whole process of bringing together a visual piece of communication has to do with a lot of sourcing the right photographer, director, designer and location, all things an art director has to be good at.

Many art director have a strong interest in design and are good designers themselves, however the graphic designer is purely thinking about how the visuals translate the message, whereas the art director thinks about the whole piece of communication and how that can be put together.

Nevertheless both work closely together to form a nicely crafted piece of communication,

——-

Below is a masterclass shared by ISBA at the School.