Who should make my ads? Here are your options and the pros and cons
When you’ve got a business to run, it can feel overwhelming to think about advertising that business. Thankfully, you’ve got options! In general, you have three to choose from: you can create ads yourself, you can work directly with a vendor (such as a TV or radio station), or you can work with an agency. But how do you know which is the right choice for your business? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each.
The DIY approach to making ads
The do-it-yourself approach entails making your own ads in house, which will then get passed on to your agency and/or vendor to be trafficked.
Its's affordable
If you have the skills and time to design your own ads, you could save yourself a lot of money! This works best if you have an in-house creative team. No need to outsource the work if you know you can do it already.
You know your brand
Nobody knows your business like the people who work for it. You spend your days immersed in your brand – and that’s expertise that takes time to be communicated to a creative partner. You already know the strengths and struggles of your business and can easily incorporate that knowledge into your creatives.
AI makes it simple
AI can make things fast, saving you time and money. If you know how to leverage the tools well.
You might not have the time
Good creatives don’t grow on trees. (And even if they did, it would take time!) Many small-to-mid-size businesses are already stretched thin, and adding creative work on top of everything else might be too much for your team.
You might not have the expertise
Not every business has a full marketing team, and many marketing teams don’t have people who specialize in the kinds of design you need. And that’s okay! But if you really want HTML5 creatives, for example, and your marketing team doesn’t know how to make them, you’ll either have to pay them to learn how (which can take a long time) or you’ll need to outsource anyway.
AI makes you look like everyone else
The same paints and brushes in your hand vs the hands of DaVinci give far different results. Remember that AI is a tool, not a miracle. Without knowing how to use it and use it well, you'll end up with the AI slop thats invading every corner of the internet.
The vendor approach to making ads
When you use a vendor for your creative work, your ads are being made by the people who run the channels they’ll be trafficked on. Examples would be a TV station filming footage and cutting a commercial for you, a radio station recording a radio spot, or an outdoor vendor designing your billboard.
It keeps things streamlined
No two ways about it: the fewer hands your creatives must pass through on their way to being trafficked, the simpler things are for you. Fewer touchpoints mean fewer opportunities for miscommunications and points of failure. At the end of the day, this will make your job easier.
It is affordable
One of the main reasons this is a popular setup is simple: in exchange for agreeing to run a sizable portion of your ad budget with a certain vendor, they’ll usually give you a good rate on the creative work. If you have a limited advertising budget, this can be a lifesaver.
Vendors are experts in their platform requirements
Since they’re the ones who will be running your ads, vendors can build your ads perfectly to spec. No need to scramble to convert files to different formats or sizes – they already know what to do, because they do it every day!
Vendors don't know your brand
Like we said earlier, no one knows your brand like you do. But a dedicated creative team has the time to get to know your brand, your struggles, and your goals. And since vendors are not primarily creative focused, they may not be able to devote as much time to learning those crucial facts. There is also the issue of your overall strategy. Vendors might make a great bulletin board, but they don't know your media strategy.
Vendors are not media neutral
Most of the time, vendors aren’t offering to do your creative work out of the goodness of their hearts. They agree to do creative work for you in exchange for a guarantee that you’ll place a certain amount (or all) of your media spend with them specifically. It’s smart business for them, but it does mean that your reach may be limited. But the bottom line is that they’ll be placing your media with themselves because it benefits them, not necessarily because it’s the best choice for your business. Once again, no eye on strategy.
You may not own the creative work
The biggest risk you take when choosing to work with a vendor for your creative work is that, often, the vendor will own the rights to whatever work they do for you. Work done by a vendor is usually owned by the vendor, with the understanding that you will run your ads with them. This can result in situations where you’re locked into spending your advertising budget with a certain station because they own your work, even if they’re not the best fit for your needs. There's that strategy problem again.Before you sign any contracts to have vendors do your creative work, make sure you understand what you’re agreeing to. You don’t want to get yourself in a situation where you want to run your ads on a different station, but you don’t have any photos, videos, or completed creatives to work with.
Using an agency to make your ads
When you entrust your creative work to an agency, your ads will be crafted by advertising pros and will be yours to keep at the end of the process.
Staffed with experts
People who live and breathe advertising are going to be the people best equipped to create excellent work. They know what’s effective and what’s not, and they’ll have both the knowledge and experience to make high-quality ads. The best agencies can succeed from both a visual and strategic perspective, giving you ads that are well poised to deliver on your goals and look great doing it.
You will own the work
When you work directly with a creative agency, the work they do belongs to you. You won’t be locked in to placing your ads on a certain channel just because that channel owns your creatives. This gives you the freedom to take your ads wherever they will perform best – and that will likely be seen in your results.
Agency work can be expensive
Of course, the fact that you’re getting the best work possible is going to come with a corresponding higher price tag. Expertise costs money. Of course, expertise can also get you better results. Whether the extra cost is worth it to potentially get more effective performance is something each individual business will have to decide.
Agency work can be slow
When you either do creative work yourself or have a vendor do it, the chain from your business to trafficked ads is much shorter. No way around it – working with an agency for your creative needs adds one more link in that chain, and with that link comes the potential for miscommunications and delays. A good agency will have processes in place to avoid this, but you can’t avoid the fact that this is a risk.
So who ultimately should make your ads? The choice of whether to design ads yourself, work directly with a vendor for your creative assets, or hire an agency is up to you and your needs. For some businesses, the ability to streamline processes and save money by DIYing or going straight to a vendor can be a perfect solution. It’s a great way to get your name out there while saving some room in your budget for other important things. But if you make that choice, just make sure you’re making it deliberately and that you what to look out for – and that you don’t end up empty handed.
Far and away the most risk of any option is your media strategy. Without a cohesive and thoughtful media strategy, you're spraying and praying. Worse yet, you're a prime target to be sold media instead of buying the right media.
