What is the difference between a digital agency and a classic marketing agency?

The world is big and advertising is lurking everywhere. On the street, on TV, in newspapers and magazines, in shops...

You take your phone out of your pocket and there it is - Facebook ads, Google ads on your favorite sites, in your own email.

❓Who creates this content and what is a digital agency? Is it just another buzzword?

No. But first, we're going to step back a bit to see what the difference is between a classic marketing agency and a digital one.

⏳ 50-60 years ago, creating advertising campaigns looked like this - a group of men sitting around a table, drinking coffee or something stronger, smoking cigarettes, and brainstorming how to sell more of them. Analog life, analog ads, killer ideas that go down in history.

Was it easier then? How do you sell cigarettes when scientific studies have declared them to be unhealthy? Here's how:

Here, John Hamm's character Don Draper not only looks good, but also provides a very valuable lesson in advertising - it's not about selling products, it's about results. Happiness sells. Consumers don't want to buy the shampoo, they want the shiny hair. They don't want to buy the cigarettes, but the feeling they get while smoking and the image a certain brand creates. This has always been the case and will continue to be the case. Only the methods by which it is achieved have changed.

💡 What is a marketing agency?

An invaluable weapon in the hands of businesses of all sizes. Not everyone can afford their own Don Draper, which is why a marketing agency gives you the opportunity to hire an entire team of professionals to take care of advertising your business from A to Z. Account managers, designers, copywriters, analysts and PR specialists stand out among them.

Marketing agencies are of three types:

• Classic. The focus here is on offline advertising - TV, radio, print.
• Digital. With a focus on online channels such as social media, email, PPC advertising, SEO, web design and more.
• Hybrid, which are a mix between the two.

Classic marketing agencies help clients grow their business by providing a full range of services, including:

• Market Research.
• Goal setting.
• Creating a strategy.
• Determining the target audience.
• Building campaigns.
• Campaign monitoring.
• Analysis of results and creation of reports.

Classic advertising agencies may be more specialized in activities such as:

• Branding;
• PR campaigns;
• organization of events;
• TV, print and radio ads;
• preparation of brochures, flyers, etc.

While the basic principles of advertising today remain the same, the landscape is so different that it requires new approaches.

Competition is fierce, and the digitalisation of all our lives means more awareness and a glut of advertising messages.

💡 What is a digital agency?

This is where the digital agency and the experts who work there come to the rescue. Their job may seem easy at first. "You're on Facebook all day? What's the big deal, I can do it too!"

The truth is, navigating the ever-changing landscape of online advertising is an endeavor that requires expert knowledge, the ability to work under stress, and a solid dose of creativity.

Whether it's pay-per-click advertising or creating content for social networks, blogs, vlogs, etc - you're both a happiness marketer like Don Draper and a digital wizard who needs to understand targeting, algorithms and data.

Agencies that provide digital services also prepare strategies, do market research, create campaigns and analyze their results, but here the focus is more on services such as:

• social networking support;
• PPC Advertising;
• SEO;
• Email Marketing;
• web design;
• UX;
• creating content for blogs (content marketing);
• data analysis (performance marketing).

The roles in a digital agency are also different - apart from the account manager, copywriter and designer (who sometimes needs to understand web design and UX), a key figure are the PPC specialists - the heroes who don't give up challenges to take your business to the top.

Every agency specializes in something, and in the future this specialization is expected to deepen even further due to market saturation and the rise of artificial intelligence.

👉 It has taken an increasingly central position in digital marketing recently and has largely successfully replaced the human element in many activities such as campaign optimization, audience targeting, even content creation.

The world we live in is radically different from the one in Mad Men - there are many more products and services to sell today, and many more channels through which to do so. It's harder to gain attention, and what's left for consumer trust.

That's why it's more profitable to be really good at something than to understand everything.

What are the differences between a classic marketing agency and a modern digital agency?

Suitable for different size businesses

Classic marketing agencies and offline advertising are by no means a thing of the past, but nowadays they are more suitable for larger businesses with higher budgets.

TV, radio and billboard ads require a lot of resources and do not provide the detailed targeting that PPC advertising offers, for example.

This means that most small to medium sized businesses struggle to take advantage of them, and even if they can afford them they may not be the best choice for their niche, for example if they offer digital services and products. For these cases, a digital agency is the best choice.

Focus of work

While ad agencies focus on the more creative part of ad creation, digital professionals spend a huge chunk of their time analyzing data, making predictions, and learning about innovations in the platforms they work with.

Method of work

The nature of working in a digital agency requires constant monitoring of campaigns, which has the ability to happen in real time. Often, there is also the option for in-the-moment adjustments.

The lower cost in some industries of digital advertising makes it accessible to people who are not professionally involved in it - a factor that is rare in offline advertising.

Unfortunately, with increasing competition comes the difficulty of qualifying for users' attention, and ineffective campaign optimization can swallow your budget without seeing the results you want.

In such cases, it is better to turn to a digital agency. Its goals are the same as advertising agencies in the 60s - to sell more products. It's just that the way it achieves them is different, right in the spirit of the times we live in.