Are advertising agencies consultants, partners or vendors? How do clients view them and more importantly how do agencies view themselves? I guess a lot depends on the client’s attitude in general to Advertising & the agencies. However, most agencies aspire to be treated like brand partners. Agencies sometimes equate themselves to specialist consultants like doctors, as an argument for clients to accept their recommendations without seeking options. Clients, on the other hand, seem to accept…
There could be 3 broad ‘levels’ in almost every department in an advertising agency: Directional, Supervisory and Execution. Each of those levels have certain expectations and job profiles (usually unwritten). In reality, the approach to ‘levels’ and designations is ‘as you please’, especially in Account Management & Creative. A ‘Senior Account Executive’ in one agency could be equivalent to a ‘brand associate’ in another and an Account Manager could be senior to an Account Supervisor…
No, don’t get me wrong. We didn’t join the business because agencies serve pizzas on working weekends. It’s because its in a way most fun you can have with your clothes on. Let me explain: agency is either asked to create (or has thought of this on their own) packaging for pizza boxes. It could be seen as just another packaging job. But they created ‘Pizza Proverbs’ – an online contest in the US. While…
As propositions go, the hand sanitizer category has perhaps seen it all: ‘because you cannot carry a wash basin everywhere to what you touch has been touched by a million others. Most of those featured in ad blogs have brought in a fresh new perspective visually. In this context a campaign fro Sanitol caught my eye. Agency: McCann Worldgroup. Via: Ads of the World While I get the idea (Touch him. And you touch everything…
Two recent Social Media snafus were in the news for different reasons: one, where the CEO was seen as insensitive in his social media avatar and the other where an outsourced social media agency used inappropriate language on a brand’s Twitter feed. The former was a case of ‘in-house’ social media presence and the other was outsourced. Social media content for a brand is created either through specialist agencies who handle ORM and social media…
The diverse nature of India is a subject of fascination for most foreigners. We in India are used to it simply because its all around us – depressing slums right next to posh residential areas, stories of opulence grabbing headlines along with those of extreme poverty. As consumers too, the diversity is apparent – glucose biscuits could very well be the only breakfast some can afford while there is a market for luxury brands too.…
If you’ve seen the ‘We are animals’ campaign for Wrangler, the residual image is likely to be that of men & women in bizarre poses in the wild. So you’ve got to wonder when Wrangler says this about their new campaign: Wrangler presents ‘Stunt’, the most action-packed, adrenaline-fuelled campaign yet in its exhilarating We Are Animals series. ‘Stunt’ features real life Hollywood stunt people performing truly fearsome stunts. The danger, the explosions and the sheer…
One of the key trends of 2010 was the rise of micro-blogging platforms like Posterous and Tumblr. (As an aside, its amazing how among the millions of online brands, a certain few suddenly come into the limelight – like Quora recently). Anyway, when I tried out Posterous I was blown away by the simplicity of it all – right from starting a blog to writing posts. I found the Tumblr dashboard a bit confusing, relatively…
The One Club called these Digital Advertising that Defined an Era. Some created their own list of ‘best digital advertising of the decade’. Common to any list that aimed to put down the best digital work of the last decade? Work done by large, often known as ‘mainline’ agencies featured in those lists. The independent or specialist digital agencies have made a mark on their own and have demonstrated that they ‘get’ the interactive business…
There was an interesting article by @babitabaruah on the lost art of Account Management. From not knowing how to switch on the Proxima to not having a point-of-view on anything, pertinent issues regarding the quality of Account Management folks was raised. We slouch. We dress more casually than a Friday night out. We do not talk. We do not make a point. We have, in fact, no point of view, most of the time. We…