Work Process of Advertising Agency
This report contains a basic “work process of advertising agency” in Bangladesh perspective. This analysis is based on recent project of banglalink which called “banglalink VFM” through the alignment with the agency carrotcomm.
In our curriculum in business schools in Bangladesh we do not have sufficient knowledge to work in any production house or any advertising agency. In most cases it is also true that business has a minor thought about the agency what can play as a trigger for business. That’s why number of student loses their interest to work in this field. Business graduates move to other profession just to get a certainty for their future. Unfortunately agency does not do much to convey this message to the fresh graduates.
While doing my internship in a production house I found it really hard to relate with my learning throughout the graduation period from BRAC business school initially. But when I go through the work procedure with the clients and agency I found the relationships of procedural systems of an advertising agency and tried to compile them in a report.
To achieve my target I look through the almost every process of “banglalink VFM” which was designed by carrotcomm and executed by Runout films. I have also talked to external sources regarding the topic and studied books related to this.
In short period of time I tried to learn every process of agency and the execution process from where many others out their get an intensive idea about the work procedure of advertising agency and it might create interest.
Introduction
While the advertising industry is dominated by the international agencies and affiliated agencies (the agencies who have partnership with international) certainly added a different fresh perspective to it. Carrotcomm one of the renowned agency is a sister concern group of market access group ltd. Is one of the very successful agency which is a local brand for our country. A, C, B, E, K… you name the vitamin, Carrot provides it to you. At Carrot, they service brands, and they believe that each brand has its own story. With Vitamin B Keratin as a fringe benefit they offer, Carrot Communication does not only let you build a strong brand that is a must for today’s competitive market, but also helps improve your Brand Vision, thus helping you create a brand story that is told through generations!
What started back in 2006 as a small in house agency of Market Access Group is today acclaimed as one of the forerunners in the Advertising scenario in Bangladesh. From Telecommunication to Food and Beverage, Baby Products to Social Services, Carrot Communication Ltd has established a position as a complete creative solution provider for a wide range of clients.
This way they achieved in such a short time because they live in dog years and work with dogged determination.
Carrot’s role is as it is demonstrable – they accelerate their clients’ reputation to help meet their business objectives. This means they do not believe in communication just for communication sake. The campaigns they plan and implement generate solid benefits for their clients.
- Carrot is a Full-Service Advertising Agency
- Carrot Communication provides the following services:
- Brand Building
- Creative Strategy and Executional Support
- New Market Entry Strategy
- Brand Growth planning
- Media Buying and Planning – Print & Electronic
- Out Of Home Strategy
- Activation strategy and execution
- Event Planning and execution
Functional Departments
- Client relations:
Brand communication: client wants big ideas to drive business results and address their challenges. Brand communications team creates break-through traditional and social media campaigns that deliver. Brand communication unit works as the allimportant contacts point between commercial clients and the agency. Brand communications team is comprised of media relation’s experts who not only understand how their work leads to business returns, but also possess unique, multichannel experience that can unite and maximize the impact of client’s communications arsenal.
Social communication: This one is another part of client relations. Its deal with the assignments relating to social development and behavior change communication issues. The people working in this unit comes from different social development organizations/ non-government organizations that have thorough knowledge on alternative development paradigms, development communication, behavior change communication as well as social marketing.
- Strategic planning & creative:
Highly skilled members constantly innovate strategy that gains the brands on the edge over the competition. Well-acquainted with all the cultural and sub-cultural trends, the team interpret the enigmatic codes of consumer perception.
To set up a strong perception to consumers mind this team always entrusted with the responsibility to decide on the most advantageous strategic positioning of our brands.
The members of this team keep the creative thought flowing on the core of entire agency. They always keep the creative energy and passion is directed towards the creation of ads that are true to the brands strategic positioning and personality as well as positioning the expected behavior for bringing a positive change in social causes.
Creative members always have to be focus on the human life and their emotion so that they can crafted ads that spark off the flames of a passionate brand-consumer love-story in the minds of the consumers.
The creative team has their authentic, experienced, innovative, and very passionate energy that loves to think out of the box, understand the issues and people’s behavior very precisely and highly skilled to translate them accurately into messages. Their knowledge always have to be up-to-date about the sea changes of this area over the decades especially the gradual shifting from top-down approach to bottom-up approach of development, the importance of peoples participation in development initiatives and their sustainability.
To understand the social market more the team has developed many programmatic, sensible, behavior change communication campaigns for social market. The graphic design and artwork team of this department are also highly experienced, skilled and brilliant that has produced many award winning designs and art work.
The team members have solid experience of their work with the blend of various social and alternative development organizations including corporate houses.
- Media:
People who are in this department have three significant responsibilities media research, media planning, media buying. In media research they try to find out the effective media, identify the target audiences and analyze their characteristics, behavior. They are also looking for the latest trend in the market for future investments.
Media planner basically understands client’s objectives and advertising strategy. Their responsibility is to get the best media mix and timing. They also have the most crucial job to minimize cost achieving best results.
Media director’s responsibility to analyze the research data so that they can manage the media department’s to check status of clients. They also check the client’s accounts and plan future media buyers. They overlook all the accounts available and to keep up the good relationships with the clients. They also negotiate with media organizations.
- Events:
From product launching to contract signing ceremonies, to press conferences to plan tours or any type of event or non-traditional promotions, experienced and dedicated team along with a support team provides complete worryfree event management that meets the client’s promotional objectives.
They are always ready for their job with never-say-die attitude, the event management team members have moved the standards in the local event management scene a few marks higher.
Clients of carrotcomm limited
SWOT analysis
Strength
- Strong strategic planning & creative team
- Locally owned
- Vast knowledge to handle the clients
- Highest media buyers
- Supporting organizations
Weakness
- No affiliation with foreign agency
- Least number of clients
- Due to shortage of manpower couldn’t finish all campaigns
Opportunity
- Brand building practice increasing
- Competition increase the higher spending on media
- User of internet create the new medium
- The industry is yet to introduce innovative media for promotion
Threat
- Global advertising giants are investing in Bangladesh
- Promotional budget get lesser
- Local company still didn’t give impotency on branding
Observations and recommendations
Carrotcomm is always punctual to meet the timeline with the client. They are always committed to deliver the best output for their client and do internal research by their own in the market to know the level of communications or effectiveness of their communication with the customers.
Second most important thing I found in carrotcomm that their organizational structure is well planned and there are no additional obstacle in any of the position of structure. It’s easy to work in this type of management because in any other agency in Bangladesh there at least nine or ten layers exist.
Even though carrotcomm always try to feed their client with the appropriate timing but most of the client in our country are always running short of time with their project. Because of that they always try to create immense pressure among agencies.
This tight timeline has been approved by the higher management without knowing the reality. As a result a large amount of workload are always there for each and every employee. To solve this administration can play a vital role to make sure no one exploit anything to create problems to others.
In an advertising agency employees are the product, and the agency sells the skills and experience of employees. Sometimes due to the flat organizational structure most of the organization couldn’t judge the experience by their designation. For example in any other agency it takes one and half year to become a senior executive from executive but in carrotcomm 2-3 years are easily gone with the same position.
To overcome this problem they can provide two sets of designation to all employees; one according to the group and the other according to the industry standards.
However, most of the agency in Bangladesh facing some serious problem in their organizational structure in that count carrotcomm has very little number of negativity in their design. This agency still creates the fascination towards the fresh graduates because it is one of the best place to build the career.
Role of an agency
In the modern market it is really important to stand still among all available competitors regardless of the industry and product or service anybody provides. For a regular consumer in most cases there is always an alternative. That’s why no matter the company is local or global they always have a tough time to achieve the desire position. In this fierce competitive market it is not always possible for the companies to make their product or service so unique or make them so appealing to the eyes of consumers.
The advertising agencies of the world provide the solution to the problem. As an expert agency come forward to play the integral part of its clients business. An ideal agency work as a partner of all its clients and works towards the growth of their businesses together.
From different agency point of view here some of the role of an agency are listed:
Communication solution provider:
Primary role of an agency is to provide communication solution for its clients, communication solution includes all sorts of medium with which the clients wants to communicate with its consumers. As a communication provider an advertising agency also provides the supporting service as well.
Understanding the consumer attitude:
An advertising agency also helps its client to understand the consumer better. It also helps to understand the consumer behavior and the consumer needs in the clients perspective. An advertising agencies works in collaboration with research agencies.
Strategic partner:
An advertising agency also acts as a strategic partner of its clients. While building a brand the client and the agency works as a strategic partners to create a better and more effective brand to ensure long term success for its clients. For the success of the business they are always committed to provide the best strategic plan to their clients.
With an every changing world and in a dynamic sector like marketing, an advertising agency plays various roles to ensure the success of clients. The advertising agency business is as such, if the clients succeeds the agency will succeed it with automatically. On the other hand if the clients fall in any plan taken by agencies it also create the reason to fall the client.
The plan
After a brief has been done now it reaches through and organized process end of which the client gets a successful campaign which solve his problem. Below process has been followed in agency:
The internal brief:
The internal brief is a document where the client service department states the problem at hand, with available data at their disposal. This document is the first of any campaign. This also include the target audience description and as well as the market data if there is any.
During the internal brief the client relation department also plans the program and it includes it in the internal brief.
Consumer insight identification:
Consumer insight is a flash of understanding on the part of a marketer regarding an undefined or unmet need in the marketplace, or a new way to satisfy an existing need.
It is not about a product or service, it’st about a consumer need that isn’t being met as well as it could be. The marketers challenge, having recognized the insight, is to find a way to capitalize on the thinking that identified the need.
That could led to a producer or service, of course, but the insight is independence of the solution.
Evaluating problem against consumer insight:
There are generally we get multiple insight in different dimensions. It is important to identify a single insight with which we will be able to satisfy our consumer and at the same time our brand will get ban edge over the competitions.
Identifying communication solution:
After narrowed down the insight we need to identify the proposition or what I want to communicate with our client and come up a vessel through which I am going to reach my consumer. These vessels are often called touch point. It is important to come up with a good communication mix so that the message I wanted to communicate is well communicated to my consumers.
Creating communication materials:
After we create the communication message we need to make sure we create communication materials according to the intended communication material and give the right message in the right way. In other word in this step we create the finish products of an advertising agency (TVC, RDC, Scripts, Print ad layout)
Execution:
After everything is ready we need to execute according our plan which was taken earlier.
Evaluation:
Evaluation is equally important for a campaign as execution. Without evaluation we don’t know how well the communication worked or did not worked.
Creative
Once the brief has been accomplished now the most challenging and important task has been fallen to the media departments and creative. Creative department proposes creative items required based on the proposition and consumer insight. Here are the creative items proposed for initial promotion.
Now the latest campaign for Banglaink VFM has been given below:
- Logo
- Print advertisement
- TVC script
Media plan
After the creative items are created a media plan is created by the media department.
While creating the media plan they consider the following information.
- Target consumer of the campaign
- Budget of the campaign
- Campaign duration
- TRP (television rating points- collected from a third party research agency)
- RRP (ratio rating points- collected from a third party agency)
- Newspaper/ magazine circulations (collected from government agencies)
Based on these information media department creates separate plan for each media (TV, Radio, press, outdoor etc.). In recent times the media department also plans to promote different brands online along with other media.
The media plan contains all the details of when advertising should get on air or published. Due to the confidential nature of these plans, it wasn’t possible to give the sample with this report.
Execution
A lot of work in agency is done by third parties in some cases the field execution of different event is facilitated by other agencies. For example to create a TV program for this competition a production team will be hired who will have their own set of crew and employee and to execute the event part of the campaign will also be given to another third party. Generally an event management firm assigned to execute the events.
While other organization executes the actual work the role of the agency changes.
The following is a list of roles an agency plays while any campaign is executed. The list is a collection of duties that an agency performs and not exhaustive to the following items.
- Branding expert: while different support agency helps the agency to actually execute the campaign, the agency makes sure the brand is getting the right mileage and saying exactly what it wants to tell to its consumer. The agency works as the brand expert and guides all parties on behalf the client to make sure the brand identity of the product/service remains intact.
- Managing third parties: the agency also act as a single focal point for the clients. The agency manages all related third parties so that the desired campaign has the perfect execution.
- Troubleshooting: nothing goes according to plan, thus it is the duty of the agency to make sure the small hiccups remains as hiccups and does not create any major problem in executing any campaign.
- Ensuring quality: It is the duty of the agency to make sure that the desired quality is attained in every aspect of the campaign.
- Revisiting the goals: one of the most important to revisit the initial plan and make sure every goal is successfully completed.
Conclusion
I try my level best to show the detail work force of agency how they work and how they execute the communication through a big journey. As I am working with different agencies for TV commercials recent time I came across a lot of knowledge about branding, marketing, communication etc. sometimes it’s very difficult to cope up with the clients as they differ from product to product service to service.
Since we learn a very little from our textbook about the vast knowledge of advertising it’s really tough to get those idea into you. That’s why I have to push myself beyond my limit just because to learn this industry intensively.
As my topic was about a detail work procedure of agency I tried to incorporate with theoretical and practical aspect of advertising agency. This little glimpse can help someone to give an idea but to learn about the advertising and this industry it’s really depend on how usefully you study books and articles.
Here I include almost every detailing about one of the most famous TV commercials of banglalink recent time, it was successful and a hit commercial to connect with the target audience and consumers. That’s the conclusive scenario of our advertising agency of recent time what I can gather from my knowledge in this report.
