Advertising - world of glamour and style: Advertising industry plays very crucial role in the success of any business. Here we provide you an opportunity to have the insight of this industry, especially those who would like to come in the field of advertising.
Advertising industry prepares advertisements for other companies and also arranges to place them in print, broadcast, interactive, and other media. This industry also includes firms that sell advertising space for publications, radio, television, and the Internet.
Advertising industry offers intangible services like image and reputation. Their aim is to attract consumers and persuade them to buy the product. Advertising agencies are paid to think up advertising campaigns, to create advertising materials, and to produce advertisements, that could be an ad on TV, magazine, radio or Internet.
Advertising agencies make presentations about their services to the company. When an agency wins the account, various departments within the agency-such as creative, production, media, and research-work together to meet the client's goal of increasing sales.
Some firms are not involved in the creation of ads at all; instead, they sell advertising time or space on radio and television channels or in publications.
Luckily most of the time employees work in comfortable and lavish offices, however, long working hours including weekends are very common.
This work is very exciting, lively, and glamorous, but on the other hand it is stressful, involves a lot of travel as frequent meetings with the clients are essential. Advertising field requires creativity and being creative under stress may be emotionally draining.
· Bright Career Opportunities
· Dynamic Experience
· Comfortable working environment
· High pressure from all sides
· Long working hours
· Weird clients
· Cruel office politics/ high firing rate
· Low starting package
The work in an advertising agency is further divided among the following sections/units:
Client servicing acts as a liaison between the client and the agency. This section is responsible to interact with the client, understand their requirement, conduct research where necessary, take the brief from the client, coordinate between the different departments of the agency in order to formulate the most effective advertising strategy with in the given budget. A successful client servicing person should have excellent communication skills, understanding to consumer behavior and the clients' need, ability to work under stress and negotiating skills.
This is responsible for conceptualizing and designing advertisements. In order to achieve the objective both those who work on visuals and those who deal with text (copy) work together. This department once given the brief by the client servicing, develop a theme. The copywriter provides the slogan, jargon, text matter and the art department handles the visuals, graphics, layouts, symbols, etc. People in this department require command over language, artistic skills, patience, ability to express innovative ideas, teamwork, and understanding of the target audience.
This department makes the appropriate media plan in the given advertising budget. After the completion of the advertisement campaign, it becomes the responsibility of the media-planning department to place the advertisement on TV, radio, press or any other medium or point of display. A media planner should have very good negotiating skills, numerical ability, complete information about the media habits of consumers.
This department plays a very important role in the advertising world. It collects data about the consumer preferences, competition, existing and potential market, trends and so on. People in this department have to be good in statistics, psychology or behavioral sciences. Mostly agencies work with market research companies for this purpose instead of having a separate market research department.
Some of the agencies also have this department. This department basically plans how to develop a brand, what strategies to be used. They guide the media planning and client servicing how to build and improve the brand.
Candidates with management or advertising qualification are preferred. Usually agencies prefer MBAs for posts in market research, client servicing and media planning. However, in some of the small agencies it not required and they usually give on-the-job training of about six months to a year. In the creative department a general BA with communication skills is the requirement for copywriters; some creative talent and a qualification in commercial art is necessary for the art department. |
