30.3.15
Advertising Agencies and How They Work
4:19 AM
Advertising agencies have changed a lot since their hay day in the 1950s. Back then, as depicted in the hit TV series Mad Men (named for Madison Avenue in New York) chain smoking men dressed in suits and ties came up with slogans and ad campaigns for their nervous clients. Clients have not changed much and continue to be nervous when it comes to staking all of their money on the ideas churned out by advertising agencies and their creative departments, but they are much more careful how they spend that money. From the 50s until just recently most advertising was either print, television, or radio and not much else.
Print advertising included display ads. Display ads ran the gamut from small two column want ads in the classified section of the local newspaper to full page double spreads in pricey magazines such as Playboy or Vanity Fair. Account executives would place their clients ads into these publications in compliance with the media plan that they created and which was approved by the client. The advertising agencies would charge a 15% commission based upon the price of the ad itself. This was a very lucrative business but in the last fifteen years or so it has changed radically with the proliferation of boutique advertising agencies and smaller design firms who had smaller overhead and basically would do the same job for a lot less commission or for a flat fee. This practice caused the advertising agencies to rethink their basic structures and cut costs across the board.
The ability to create ads using computers did not really come into widespread practice until the late 1980s and the very first computers were not really computers at all but giant Linotronic typesetting machines that took up most of one room and required the use of toxic chemicals to produce professional looking type. A few years later Apple came out with their first Macintosh computers and helped to start the graphics revolution that continues to this day. Those first Apple computers were tricky and required a lot of maintenance. It was faster many times to do the ad in the old fashioned way by hand using overlays and press type than to actually fiddle around with the primitive Mac. Eventually Macs became more stable and when programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator came into being, the way that ads were created was changed forever.
Part of print advertising is collateral work and that includes brochures, catalogs, direct mail pieces, pamphlets, and any other two dimensional graphics piece that is not classified as print ads. Until digital printing took over in the late 90s, most of these collateral pieces were printed by large four color printing houses. The resulting work was beautiful for the most part but would cost a bundle. Four-color offset printing was not cheap but it was high quality. Digital printing made collateral printing much cheaper but the quality really suffered, mainly because the inks would run and the stock that would go through the printers was not very thick or varied.
Todays best advertising agencies have state-of-the-art digital computers and printers in-house along with teams of top notch copywriters, graphic designers and art directors. If you want to see samples of some of the top work each year just pick up a Communication Arts graphic design or advertising annual. This publication features full color photos of the best in advertising design each year.