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What is Advertising?

Career Overview

Ads seem to be everywhere: filling magazines, on billboards lining the road, and showing up at regular intervals on television. Their object: to market and sell goods and services. According to Ad Age, a trade magazine, companies spent close to $80 billion dollars on advertising in 1998.

Careers in advertising can be lucrative. You might go into the business side of account management (a function WetFeet.com covers more completely in another Career Profile) or account planning; the creative side, where you'll create ads (many people interested in visual arts, design -- particularly graphic design -- and editorial and writing careers join ad agencies as creatives) or media planning or production. Some people interested in advertising may find they prefer public relations, where you'll have a similar goal, though your means will be quite different.

An advertising agency is a marketing consultant. It helps a client -- a manufacturer of consumer products such as Nike, or a service-oriented company such as Charles Schwab & Co. -- with its marketing efforts, from strategy to concept to execution.

Strategy involves helping a client make high-level business decisions, such as how to brand a new line of suntan lotions. The agency takes a client's strategy and turns it into a specific concept for advertisements -- such as a series of ads featuring extreme athletes for a soft-drink maker with a strategy of making inroads in the teen market.

Execution is where an agency turns a concept into reality -- the production of actual ads: the print layout, the Web design, the film shoot, or the audiotaping. Execution also involves placing the ads -- buying space in newspapers, on television, or in subway stations.

Account-driven agencies' ads usually focus on product benefits, while creative agencies' ads focus on brand image. As a result, account-driven agencies end up with accounts such as Energizer batteries, for which an "Energizer Bunny" campaign extolled the product's long life. Creative agencies end up with accounts where lifestyle or image is more important, such as Old Navy, which uses retro clothing styles to connect with its teen and twenty-something market.

Advertisers play a role in shaping the ads that shape our culture. The work you do will be determined partly by the type of agency you're in and your role within it. You'll work in one of five departments -- account management, account planning, media, production, or creative.

Account management is the clients' primary contact. There you'll juggle a number of projects, and ensure that they come in on time, on budget, and on strategic target.

In account planning, you'll try to understand consumer behavior and use your knowledge to devise strategies for clients.

Media decides where to place ads, and in which medium -- radio, television, print, or Web -- when, and for how long.

Production involves physical creation of the ads, either in-house or outsourced. If you're a creative, you'll be responsible for turning strategies into concepts that can be made into finished ads -- for example, showing well-dressed people driving up to a discount store to highlight a change in product selection.

Creative departments also create storyboards -- cartoon-style summaries of what an ad will contain.

Some larger agencies contain traffic departments to handle the flow of projects between departments; new-business departments, which keep track of possible new clients and gather resources in preparation for pitches; and public relations departments, which direct publicity programs and are covered in greater depth in another WetFeet.com Career Profile.

To learn more about what you'll do in advertising, and advertising in general, read WetFeet.com's Industry Insider Guide -- buy the guide for immediate download by going to So, You Want to Be in Advertising.

To succeed in advertising, you need to be creative, organized, motivated, good with people, tactful, culturally aware, decisive, resilient, and able to handle deadlines and stress. You'll also have to be able to work individually and in a team environment, understand buying and selling patterns, understand and incorporate technology, and appreciate creativity.

For a career in account planning, you'll also have to be capable of carrying out qualitative and quantitative research. Good media planners are detail-oriented, good at math, and have a thorough understanding of marketing. On the creative side, you've got to be able to handle pressure and deal with the frustration of having clients who may not understand or appreciate your creative vision.

Job seekers looking for positions in advertising have had a hard time of late due to recent economic events, particularly the decline of the dot coms and the overall recession. Like many other industries, advertising has experienced consolidation in recent years as companies join forces to lower costs and stay competitive in the global marketplace. In addition, as companies have responded to the decline in the economy by cutting advertising spending, ad agencies have had to lay off employees to stay afloat. Between these factors and the fact that many people want to work in advertising, competition for jobs is exceedingly stiff.

Longer-term, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Relations projects the number of jobs in the advertising industry to outpace the average for all industries between 2000 and 2010.

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