Advertising space

Ann Murray Chatterton, Director of Professional Development at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) tells Prospects about the many roles that advertising can offer graduates.

Jobs in advertising can be divided into business orientated and creative roles. On the business side there are a number of roles for people who want to work in the advertising industry but don’t feel that they can come up with the creative ideas like copywriters or art directors.

On the business side, around 600-700 jobs come up every year within agencies which are members of the institute of practitioners in advertising. As a trade body we have about 260 members and they employ 17,000 staff. About 4% of those are first year graduate trainees.

Around 30% of these trainee jobs are in creative agencies and about 70% are in media agencies. The main job roles in creative agencies for non-creative graduates are account management, account planning and project management.

Account management

Graduates often come into the business as a trainee, before becoming an executive and then an account manager. As the contact between the client and the agency the account manager will liaise with the client and find out what the client’s business problem is before coming back to the agency and bringing with them as much information as possible. They are also responsible for investigating the market and the competitors and they work together with the account planner to write the brief for the creative teams.

Account management is open to graduates from any discipline. The industry does not require any vocational background into the business side of the industry. Diversity of thinking is really important and so the broader the mix of people you can get within an agency, the more lateral thinking that you will get. Around 15% of the graduates that come in have an advertising background in the creative agencies.

Some agencies recruit straight into the account planner role and others recruit from their account management graduates which means that account management is a very good training for account planning.

Account planning and product management

Account planning has much more focus on the consumer. Account planners go out and do research with consumers to find out what really makes them tick, why they do what they do and why they believe what they believe. It is only by understanding the consumer that an agency can come up with an insight that can stimulate reappraisal of the brand.

The third area of work on the business side is project management. These are the people that translate creative ideas into actual execution. They will be the ones who have a really good knowledge of different photographers and film directors, what they cost, how they work and how to cast for a commercial or a photographic shoot. Project managers enjoy being involved in the creative work but they want to see a final execution and they have very good attention to detail.

Creativity at work

On the creative side of the business, employees are normally structured in teams. Traditionally this was the art director and copywriter but we’ve gone through a phase where there hasn’t been much copy in advertising so copywriting skills have been shared.

Typically a creative team is called an ideas team. They tend to come out of art and design college and whilst they are at college they develop a book of ideas or ‘portfolio’ which is their way into the business. Rather than a traditional recruitment process or graduate training scheme they usually enter the business through a number of creative placements.

Graduates will take their portfolio to a creative director and if they feel it is good enough they may offer them a three month placement so that they can build ideas working on real life briefs in a sort of apprenticeship.

These placements are generally paid and we advise our agencies that if graduates are coming in post-completion then they should pay at least the minimum wage. However there is over supply of art and design students and sometimes when agencies don’t have any more creative placement roles they can be prepared to provide work space for the students where they can work for free if they choose to.

Overall these are the roles that people tend to start in on both the business and creative sides, and the lovely thing about the industry is that it is very, very varied. There are all sorts of things that might come up from charity advertising to commercial advertising and graduates can choose to join an agency that has the culture and the attitudes that they most prefer to work with.

Further information:

• Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA)