Advertising: Working with an agency

In my career, I’ve been both on the requesting (sourcing) side of advertising creation and on the creative side. If you’re considering creating an ad for your campaign, the best advice I can give you is to be clear with what you want, so as to avoid multiple revs and save time.

Before you assign the work to the agency, draw up some details. Give a concise, but accurate, summary of what your ad needs to convey, including:

• call to action
• key messaging to include
• branding guidelines
• (and, occasionally, provide creative concepts. Think general here though, as you don’t want to box in your agency’s creativity!)

Almost more importantly than the above to-do list is one final point: be sure to let the agency know what NOT to do. Are there key words/phrases that your competitors use, that you need to stay away from? How about color palettes or graphics/icons you definitely don’t want to use?

The more information you can provide to the agency up front (but succinctly, so as not to overwhelm), the less rounds of review/revamps you’ll have to undergo – which saves money (most creative houses bill hourly) and time.