Commercial advertising is the term used to describe advertisement which has a commercial focus. It is what is used to intrigue and, eventually, caused consumers to purchase a good or service. The field itself is varied to fit the needs of the smallest business to the biggest corporation, thus it’s important to understand how the field works.
At the very basic building block, a commercial advertising agency acts to bridge the gap between companies and consumers.
They make use of every form of media imaginable in order to introduce and ultimately sell the client’s product to the mass of consumers out there. The client usually dictates some or all of the advertisement campaign to the agency. Besides being responsible for the actual advertisement, commercial advertising companies are generally responsible for measuring the reach and effectiveness of the campaigns so that the client.
The need for advertising agencies comes about when a company lacks the resources to do its own advertising. This can be a completely understandable thing due to the amount of effort surrounding the entire advertisement process which isn’t limited to just getting the message out.
The process involved with commercial advertising usually begins with the client and agency coming together to form an advertisement strategy. The client may simply bring their product to an agency and ask for suggestions, or they may propose a plan and simply have the agency perform it. The planning process also includes the research of various demographics, product testing with test groups and choosing which type of media should be used to market the client’s item.
The way that advertising agencies operate can vary widely from area to area. Some agencies will only advertise to local groups, while other will advertise globally and in a number of languages. There are three major categories in which an agency be classified as.
The most common type of agencies are those that provide full service. As the name suggests, they provide planning, production, publishing, distribution and metrics. This type of operation is the most common as it encompasses every aspect of the advertisement process. Full service agencies also tend to have a wide array of developed contacts that make the process easier and often times more success.
The second type of firm is a limited service agency. A limited service agency will specialize in just one of the advertisement processes, typically in the production or metric gathering stages. Companies may choose to rely on these if they already have an advertising department that lacks the needed capacity to handle part of the process.
The other advantage that limited service agencies have is a specialization for advertising with one type of media. Some may specialize in radio broadcasting, others in television and so on.
The third type of advertising agency is usually found within a company as an in-house agency. They will treat other parts of the company just like they would a client. While this type of advertising team may not specialize in one part of the advertisement process, they do carry the advantage of having separate deadlines and different views on parts of the process, such as how a product should be delivered to an audience.
Commercial advertising agencies will typically take up fees in one of two ways. They will either request a flat fee paid before the advertising process begins, or they will request to work by commission for a period of time. The latter choice of compensation may not always work to the client’s advantage due to the fact that the cost scales with the amount of time the client purchases from the agency to process the campaign. Many clients prefer to be able to pay the agency upon the completion of a successful campaign.
Many advertising agencies are expanding the media that they can influence. Some agencies are even going so far as to offer a number of internet-based services, such as search engine optimization services, submission to directory services and paid search engine listings in their bag of tools. Clients have found this advantageous due to the fact that all of these listed methods are much easier to measure accurately than traditional mediums like television advertisement, radio broadcasting and newspaper ads are.