Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The agency website is a vital part of the sales cycle, especially when starting out. It serves as the first touch point with a prospective client, where they come to see previous work, and get a sense of the ethos and working style of the agency.

An impressively executed agency website means more work with higher calibre of clients.

So if you’re starting up a new agency, or looking to refresh your online presence, you’re in the right place! We’ve scoured over the web to bring you these 30 stunning examples of impressive and creatively realised agency websites. Beautiful designs, exquisitely executed. Read on!...

As competition grew in the late 1960s and the phone stopped ringing, ad agencies turned to their public relations cousins and asked for help to stand out. From the mid ‘60s on, this took the form of pumping out press releases and cultivating media to cover agency activities. The vast majority of the content was announcing new clients an agency had picked up and awards won at the ever-increasing number of shows.

Both of these items quickly became table-stakes material, contributing no real differentiation for the agencies. Sadly, the biggest innovation agencies introduced in subsequent decades was hiring public relations professionals to work in-house.

All this did was reduce cost as these folks brought little new to the equation. The result is advertising agencies have confused public relations with brand building for the past 50 years. Do not get me wrong: Public relations has a part to play in ensuring an advertising agency is top of mind. However, most public relations practiced by agencies remain incredibly traditional and shockingly boring for an industry that prides itself on creativity. Avi Dan, founder of Avidan Strategies, wrote in a Forbes article that agencies that hire a public relations firm as a way to solve new business struggles are soon disappointed....

Advertising executive Andrew Teman wrote a blog about why he's dropping out of the game because of Oreo's infamous Super Bowl blackout tweet...

....Real time marketing has become the "it" thing in advertising. Minutes after the royal baby's birth, a slew of marketers tweeted out pre-packaged images and messages "spontaneously" reacting (and capitalizing) on the moment.

Teman continues: "In bestowing this award on this piece of work, we’re actually exposing a really sad truth. That the advertising industry has become so top-heavy with cost and process and approvals and meetings and waste, that the idea of just making a simple image, and deploying it to a simple platform at an opportune moment, is considered at this point to be ground-breaking."...