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The Big Advertising Agency Resource List

Peter · May 31, 2022 · 42 Comments

Advertising Agency Resource List – Updated Often

My Advertising Agency Resource List is curated often to help advertising, digital, design, and PR agencies easily find the inspiration and industry resources that will help y’all build killer agencies and careers.

If I were you, I’d grab a glass of Larkmead Cabernet Sauvignon 2016 (LOL only $150 or a nice craft beer – a bit less expensive) and check out all of these links. I guarantee that at least one of these websites and/or tools will help you or your team grow your agency.

Dig growth and sharing? Therefore my friends, go ahead and share this page with your friends, family, and staff.

A kudo from David Ogilvy: “I wish I had this advertising resource list when I was in the ad biz. All I had was my brain.”

OK, one more. This here Peter Levitan blog has over 800 posts dedicated to helping your marketing communications company grow. I hope that my insights on the art and science of agency business development, growth, and management help you to make more bucks. Speaking of resources and advice, take me up on my Corleone offer.

A Couple Of Quickies:

Website Speed Is Good. A slow website drives down SEO. Check out your website.

Google PageSpeed Insights. Do you know how fast your website download speed is and how its performance ranks against your competitive agencies? Here’s the drill. If your site takes too long to download, it will lose some traffic.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Here’s another very important test. If you are like me, over 20% of your website visitors are looking at you on a mobile device then you better make sure that they are digging how fast your website loads.

BROWSEO.We might be getting a bit geeky here. That said, BROWSEO helps you view any web page like search engines see it. The tool helps you to identify issues with your site and with your current and future clients’ websites.

And, To help Your Thought Leadership Program: What Are People Searching For?

AnswerThePublic. This is a free visual tool that shows you what questions and queries your consumers have by getting a free report of what they’re searching for at Google.

Exploding Topics. Yes, just like it sounds.

Google Trends. Chances are good that you are aware of Google Trends. This a powerful tool to help you know what is hot and what is not on Google’s search universe. A look at the top 2019 Google searches may or may not make you a fan of humanity.

Social Mention. Ever wonder what the world is saying about you or your company? Here you go.

OK – The Advertising Agency Resource List…

Here are the topics covered:

Advertising Agency News Sites
Ad Agency Directories
Top Advertising Blogs
Favorite Social Media Tools
Video Marketing Tools & Information
Creative Inspiration & Idea Generation
Creative Space & Time
Online Advertising Education
Online Legal Resources
Life After Advertising & How To Make $$$
Top Twitter Tools
Top Advertising And Design Awards
Marketing & Advertising Podcast
Marketing Tool Generators

Advertising Agency News Resources

The Ratti Report. Your agency needs fresh business development leads, right? So check out this website for a daily list of business development opportunities. News you can use to buy that new Tesla Roadster.
Advertising Age. Ad Age delivers the latest news from the world of advertising and marketing agencies.
Ad Asia Online. AdAsia Online focuses on automation, advertising technology, and creative technology,
AdNews. Australia’s advertising, marketing, and media industries news resource.
Adweek. Adweek covers media news, including print, technology, plus.
branding in asia. Need to know what’s up in the Asian marketing and advertising world? Sure you do. Check out this comprehensive resource for creative work, news, interviews, and insights. Read it and you just might take the next non-stop to Singapore.
Business Insider. Business Insider’s daily take on the ad industry.
Campaign Asia. Campaign Asia reports on advertising and emerging media in the Asia Pacific region.
Campaign Magazine. Ad industry news from the UK’s advertising industry “bible”.
Communication Arts. Print publication offering competitions, forums, feature articles, job bank, graphic design resources and online shopping.
Creative. The magazine of promotion and marketing.
Digiday. Digiday creates content, services, and community that foster change in media and marketing.
Direct Marketing News. Provides news, feature articles, columns, and special reports on direct marketing.
The Drum. The alternative to Campaign. Delivers lots of news and views.
MediaPost. Comprehensive advertising and media industry coverage.
TechCrunch. Keep up (or try to keep up) with the fast-paced world of startups and VCs.

Ad Agency Directories

OOO The Critical Facebook and Instagram Mistake

Peter · October 17, 2021 · Leave a Comment

AH. The Big & Critical Facebook and Instagram Mistake.

I’ve been writing for PetaPixel, a leading photography website with over 7,000,000 page views per month. Here is an article I wrote that I think should be of value, as a thought-starter, for people in the advertising business. Frankly, I see advertising agencies and their clients relying way too much on Facebook and Instagram. That’s why I wrote Don’t Make the Critical Facebook and Instagram Mistake. You can see my PetaPixel work here.

OK, Stop The Mistakes

I have a good friend that uses Facebook as his photography business’s digital platform. I have multiple friends that use Instagram as their portfolio. This also goes for, yes to a lesser degree, using Behance, Tumbler, Model Mayhem, Imgur, and Flickr as a portfolio destination.

The primary issue for all these websites is that you do not own or control them. You are loaning your work to them and must abide by their rules and regulations. And future business model.

Oops

Both Instagram and Facebook recently went down for hours. This meant that beyond not being able to look at photos of your friends’ kids, if your photography world counted on either of these sites, your business and portfolio went down too. It’s like you did not exist. This was painful for millions of businesses, many of which only use Facebook as their business information website. I’d imagine that millions of dollars of sales were lost that day.

While this event was a Facebook server issue, are you sure that Facebook and Instagram, as we know them today, will be here in their current formats forever?

Forever, as in the place that you want to show your work – forever?

Remember Myspace?

For a few years, Myspace was the ultimate destination for musicians to share their work and build reputations. From 2005 to 2008 it was the largest social media site.

Popular musicians like Arctic Monkeys and Calvin Harris made their names on Myspace. Unfortunately trusting Myspace turned out to be a rather bad idea. From a Myspace press release:

As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience.

“Inconvenience.” Really?

At that time, CNN reported that “Andy Baio, a tech expert and former chief technology officer of crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, warned that the music of up to up 14 million artists may have been lost.”

Own Your Work

Other than morality issues, I am sure that having your work on Facebook and Instagram is a good idea. Each platform reaches zillions and, in the case of Instagram, is known as a photography destination. Plus, you get the dopamine hit from all those cherished ‘likes.’

However, trusting these third-party platforms as your primary and forever marketing resource is a BAD idea.

I’ll state the obvious. Add your own website to your marketing mix. Yes, I know that this is obvious. However, in the case of Instagram, too many photographers trust it as their little photo universe. They may have a real website, but because they view updating as a pain in the rear, they do not keep it updated. Updating is in the eye of the beholder. Do you really have to show every photograph you take? Editing is a good thing.

A side note related to marketing: both of these sites are trending older. If reaching the under-35 crowd is important, you might be missing a sizable audience.

Your Partners Include Mark Zuckerberg

Instant Social Media Content For Your Brand And Advertising Agency

Peter · June 16, 2020 · Leave a Comment

I’ve updated this blog post about, well, I’ll repeat the title for you, and especially Google. Instant Social Media Content For Your Brand And Advertising Agency.

OK, I admit it, there is no totally instant social media content. But, there is fast. In fact, fast and good. In fact, there really is fast + good + cheap. Which, as you might suspect, will make a brand and any advertising agency very happy.

I have used a few different methods to accelerate the generation of my more than 700 blog posts. Try a few of these on for size.

TikTok

I am going to write about TikTok in detail in the very near future. TikTok which, given its size and growth, is the most underutilized advertising agency business development social media platform. Hmmm. Why?

Here is what I think. Some possible agency excuses not to use TikTok…

TikTok is too young.
Too international.
Too new. As in, why should I bother? Um, remember when you didn’t use Instagram?
None of my clients have asked about it.
Worse… I do not have a TikTok account.

Interviews

Interviewing an expert, or even a consumer in your client’s or client industry or target market can take as few as 5 minutes up to say 45. A 45-minute interview will deliver approximately 8,000 words that you could cut up into 4 2,000 word blog entries or whatever you like to do with social media content, ur, I mean highly valuable insights. My book on presenting and pitching has multi interviews that I also amplified into blog posts. You bought the book so you’ve read those interviews and will now win more pitches – right?

I was recently interviewed for the Working Without Pants podcast. After Selling Your Agency, was published, I sent it to Rev.com and now have an 8,000-word transcript I will soon edit down into bite-sized blog posts. One will be a foundational blog post on how and why to sell your agency.

Do Videos

Easy… just turn on your webcam (or iPhone) and talk. I mean, you are an advertising agency, right? You can do this and start to own some SEO juice on YouTube. Less easy, but easy enough ideas: Go on the street and do some interviews (social distance yourself, please) or do a webcam interview with a genius (remember you can turn that into copy via an audio transcription company like REV.com.)

Rip Off A Podcast

Here’s a post I created by responding to the Adage interview with Lindsay Slaby. I took the interview, sent it to rev.com for transcription, and commented on what Lindsay was saying. Easy, smart, and brilliant. All around. Here is the blog post that was created by borrowing some content from Ad Age, Ad Age Small Agency Conference Podcast.

Do Your Own Podcast

I have a new Advertising Stories podcast. I interview people. They talk to me. I, well do not steal, but I do get lots of smarts out of their mouths. Plus, the entire process is essentially free.