There are a number of different advertising agency jobs available. The range of positions at a given agency will depend on the function of that agency. Some are limited to specific areas, like media-buying, and the jobs of their employees will thus be restricted to that sphere. Other agencies, however, offer a full spectrum of advertising services and accordingly employ a variety of employees. At a full-service agency, jobs generally fall within four categories: account management, research, creative services, and media services.
Account management positions might be thought of as the most business-oriented advertising agency jobs. At a basic level, the account management department functions as a liaison between its agency’s client and the agency itself. Its responsibilities include ensuring that the other departments understand the needs of its clients and that these needs are fulfilled efficiently, allowing the agency to profit from its accounts. The account management department is subdivided into a number of positions of varying rank, from entry-level assistant executives to senior-level account directors.
While the account management department is responsible for conveying the client’s needs to the agency, the research department attends to the other side of the buyer-seller relationship, establishing a picture of the consumer which each account will target. The work of the research department is often highly analytical in nature. Its members gather a range of data like sales histories for the client’s product as well as competing products; they may also work directly with potential consumers through activities like focus groups. The department then studies the information it has amassed to define the client’s target audience and determine how that audience might be reached.
Several more advertising agency jobs are found in the creative services department. Once the client’s product, advertising history, and current needs have been communicated to the agency, the creative department translates these elements into an advertising concept and finally a physical advertisement. Ads can take a number of forms, like television commercials or printed documents. Thus the creative department is composed of a mixture of employees like photographers, illustrators, text editors and script writers who, collectively, can generate advertisements in various media.
A last category of advertising agency jobs, media services, is dedicated to finding placements for finished advertisements. Employees of the media services department might use the consumer profiling provided by the research department to determine where advertisements should appear so that they will reach their target audience on an effective scale. The wide range of possible venues can include newspapers, the Internet, radio, and television. Once the most suitable venues have been established, department members are responsible for contacting each to purchase advertising space and/or time. In addition to seeking maximum exposure for their clients, media buyers must also adhere to the budget set out for each account.
