Advertising agencies emerged as an important branch in the business world around late 1800s and served as a broker of purchasing advertising space in print media (such as magazines and newspapers) (Joseph, n. d.). As the role of advertising agencies evolves with new business practices and technological innovations, creative services were later added to their core functions to generate revenues (Joseph, n. d.). Overall, the main role of advertising agencies is to create an advertising campaign for their clients on the basis of detailed market research (Joseph, n. d.). According to Management Study Guide (n. d.), advertising agencies play the following roles to facilitate the marketing communications functions of the business world: 1) The creation of advertisements on the basis of market-related information about client’s product or service; 2) The design, collection, and analysis of the client, the advertised product/service, and consumer behaviors; 3) To planning and implementation of platform and media in a campaign; 4) The collection and analysis of the reactions from the clients and the customers for future campaigns. There are five types of traditional advertising agencies, ranging from full service agencies, interactive agencies, creative boutiques, media buying agencies, and in-house agencies (Management Study Guide, n. d.).
On the basis of the above classification, interactive agencies are most relevant to the focus of this chapter. According to Management Study Guide (n. d.), this type of advertising agencies emphasizes the use of emerging modes of communications (such as online advertisements, mobile phone advertisements to produce original interactive campaigns. The emergence of multi-platform ecosystem is likely to impact upon the above traditional categorization and offer new opportunities for diverse agencies to offer cross-functional services (Newman, 2017). For example, IQ, a digital advertising agency established in 1995, positions itself as “an integrated agency focused on the demanding, digitally savvy consumer. Today that means virtually everybody who over the last 20 years has become adept at using digital channels to discover, evaluate and buy almost everything” (IQ, n.d.). The mission statement of this new agency below clearly shows how emerging multiplatform advertising has shaped future advertising agency:
Today’s demanding consumers and complex marketplace require brands to first construct a strong foundation of strategic intelligence and planning. This leads to creative tactics that have a greater chance of success. We call this approach “Creative Intelligence” and it informs all of IQ’s work (IQ, n.d.).
The advent of multi-platform advertising practices has been predicted to create a schism between advertising agencies and clients (Newman, 2017). According to 2017/18 Global Digital Outlook Study published by Forrester and SoDA, advertising agencies tend to “identify innovation along the principles of design thinking (“solving existing problems in unique and novel ways”) while marketers most value the idea of being first (“doing something that’s never been done before” or “embracing new technology before our competitors do”)” (SoDA, 2017). The growing importance of multi-platform advertising agencies is best demonstrated by the foundation of the trade organization of 100 leading agencies, The Digital Society (SoDA) that “…serves as a network and voice for entrepreneurs and innovators around the globe who are creating the future of marketing and digital experiences.” Figure 1 shows a list of agencies that offer multi-platform advertising services.
In the traditional advertising and marketing communications paradigm, the purposes of advertising are to deliver client’s message to the targeted consumers to communicate brand’s core messages. With the emergence of multi-platform channels, brand messages are delivered to consumers through a variety of channels. Therefore, the objectives of this book chapter are to provide a preliminary assessment of the emerging multi-platform advertising agencies, what these agencies have done to showcase their best practices, what their visions are, how their emergence helps shape future advertising and marketing communications industry, and what are emerging effectiveness metrics to measure multi-platform campaign success.