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 860 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. 

AI Tools (April 2023)

Yikes. There are new AI tools designed for marketers every day. OK, OK. But, here are a few of my current favorites (I stress current):

ChatGPT. Obviously, you know about this. Here is a nice prompts mini-list for marketers:

Jasper and Copy.ai are AI content generators that utilize AI to generate high-quality content for various purposes. Jasper has been in the market for longer and is more feature-filled, while Copy.ai offers templates, a chatbot, and team features.

MarketMuse is a content optimization tool that utilizes NLP and machine learning algorithms to improve the quality and relevance of your content for better SEO and audience engagement.

Pictory and Synthesia are AI video generators that create high-quality videos without prior experience in video editing or design. Synthesia offers over 60 languages and various templates, a screen recorder, a media library, and more.

A Couple More 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

• Ad Forum. Global agency directory and creative gallery.
• Advertising Agency Search Consultants. My list of the top 34. Any missing?
• agency compile. A directory of marketing communications agencies plus a searchable database.
• Agency Spotter. Super fast search for creative, digital, design, and branding firms.
• The Creative Ham. A list of who the Ham views as the most creative agencies. You can pay up too.
• LookBook from Ad Age. Use the LookBook Directory to see ad agencies’ robust offerings and content featured in Advertising Age & Creativity to discover new marketing partners.
• Dmoz. Long-term directory of selected advertising agencies in the United States and Canada. Oooops. DMOZ is gone. But here is link to its history for people interested in, sort of, the early days of search.

Top Advertising Blogs

• Peter Levitan. Yes, MINE! Over 800 blog posts designed to help you grow your advertising, digital, and PR agency. Here’s the list of them all.
• Agency Post. In-depth HubSpot blogs for the agency professional.
• Bob Hoffman. Bob Hoffman’s personal unfiltered take on the advertising universe.
• Adweek Blogs. Just laugh. Please.
• AdFreak. Adweek’s daily stuff about the best and worst of creativity.
• AdPulp. Serious juice from the ad biz.
• Advertising Age Blogs. AdAge’s blogs & columns covering advertising, media, and digital news.
• Agency Spy. Agency Spy covers the ad agency industry from the inside.
• Digital Project Manager. Simply put… “The Digital Project Manager provides project management guidance for the digital wild west where crazy clients, tiny budgets & silly deadlines reign supreme.” Check out their interview with moi.
• Demandbase. Want to grow your advertising agency? Demandbase’s Account Based Marketing will tell you how to do that.
• Fuel Lines. Insights from Mr. Gass.
• Seth Godin. Just because.
• Strands of Genius. Follow Rosie & Faris on their voyage to unearth ideas, events, news, and who knows. You’ll be smarter.
• TrinityP3. Australia! Like learning? Just sign up for their Twitter account. Yes, they speak Australian.

Favorite Social Media & Design Tools – A Sweet Element of This Advertising Agency Resource List

• Amazon Best Sellers. Here is a list just for you if you want to see what the world is buying.
• 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.
• 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.
• Buffer. The fastest way to schedule and share content across social media platforms.
• Canva. A free tool that makes it easy to create custom graphics to go with your social media posts.
• ContactOut. ContactOut is a handy way for you to find actual, human email addresses for people on LinkedIn. 
• Google Alerts. Stay ahead of your client, a prospective client (as in category, brand, and people), and industry news by creating a list of Google Alerts.  Frankly, this should be a primary business development t tool.
• Google Analytics. You want to track your website right?
• 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.
• Google Ads. Yes, your advertising agency can run ads for itself.
• Google Trends. This a powerful tool to help you know what is hot and what is not on Google’s search universe.
• Grammarly. Check your spelling and grammar right from your browser. I have to have this!
• Klear. Find Influencers on Twitter via Klear’s large database of 60K+ categorized social profiles.
• Looka. As they say: Design your own beautiful brand. Use Looka’s AI-powered platform to design a logo and build a brand you love.
• Long Tail Pro. A keyword tool used by the pros.
• The Portent Content Idea Generator. Yes, it is a bit crazy. But, it does stimulate the mind to look for click-bait headlines for your blog, Instagram thing, or whatever. Put in “advertising“. Then laugh. I put in “chicken” and got this…16 Secrets About Chicken The Government Is Hiding 
• Snagit. A screen image and video capture plugin that allows you to grab what you see on your computer screen to edit and share.
• Social Mention. Ever wonder what the world is saying about you or your company? Here you go. 
• Sproutsocial. A sweet social media tool to manage messages across multiple accounts.
• tweepi. A fast way to grow your Twitter Follower list.
• TweetDeck. A desktop Twitter management tool with a nice clean UI.
• Twitonomy. I love this competitive tool. See what the other guy is up to.
• Ubersuggest. I use this and here is what they say: “Improve keyword research with Ubersuggest. Start a free trial now and optimize your SEO! “
• Website Grader. Try HubSpot’s Website grader on your website. How do you do? I get a 94.
• Yoast. The best WordPress SEO plugin. Me = www.peterlevitan.com on WordPress uses this tool every day.

Video Marketing Tools & Information

• Facebook Video. Facebook’s video marketing guide.
• YouTube Intro. YouTube’s very own guide to its video ad platform.
• SEO Chat Keyword Suggest Tool. This is a cool tool to easily find a range of keywords for videos.
• SproutSocial. Vimeo or YouTube… which is best for agency marketing?
• Vimeo. HD videos for all.
• Wistia. A lovely and smart video marketing platform for business. Nice tracking.

Creative Inspiration & Idea Generation

• Ads Of The World. According to them: Ads of the World is the world’s largest advertising archive.
• Adland. Ads and more ads.
• Awwwards. A place to view some of the latest and greatest websites.
• Brand New. An opinionated look at corporate and brand ID work.
• Complex. A fine and, yes, complex look at current culture. Hours of fun.
• Creative Guerrilla Marketing. The name kinda gives it away.: A full plate of design substances for your body and mind.
• deMilked. An endless array of posts about what everyone else is doing.
• Friends Of Type. Even type freaks can be friendly.
• FWA. An excellent resource to taste some of the best website designs.
• Indie Nudes. Do not spank me for this one – AKA porn and much more. Just make (!) sure you scroll around and look at all of the links. This is a very creative space.
• Inspiration Room. A global effort designed to influence, affect and involve creative communities. As in, ideas to get you going.
• Neil Patel. The DUDE. A blog about analytics, marketing, and testing. The real deal to help you help 2016 clients.
• Packaging Of The World. A sweet searchable database of the global package design universe.
• Social Media Examiner. Your guide to the social media jungle.

Creative Space & Time

• Moving To Mexico. I wrote this just for you. Why and how to move to Mexico. I did. I’m very happy.
• Ad Block: OK, OK, I know that this is a major NO-NO. But, stop looking at those Zappos ads!
• Bose Quiet Comfort Headphones. My favorite noise-canceling phones. Airplanes love these.
• Coffitivity: Stream the sounds of a coffee shop at work. Good training for when you freelance.
• Duolingo. Fast (up to you) and free online & mobile way to learn languages.
• Games List: Need a break?
• Headspace. Just like it sounds. A meditation app for your mobile, available for both iPhone & Android.
• The Newspaper Club. I have been shooting a global photography series. More portraits of more people on more continents than ever. Grandiose and, yup, fun. You can see the work here. One of the things I do after photographing a community is to make them a “photo newspaper.” I use The Newspaper Club to print a bunch to share. My mommy always told me to say thank you. Think about what your agency could do with paper to get the attention of your next client (yes, paper.)
• Noisli: Background noise & color generator.
• Spotify. My streaming system.
• Timer Tab: A tool to help control your thinking time.
• toggl. As an agency owner, I needed to keep track of the hours that we all used to meet the needs of our clients. While I think that tracking every minute kinda sucks, we simply have to track our time to help the agency be profitable. toggl is a very simple timer tool.
• Trello. Keep track of everything & collaborate. Think teams.

Online Education

• Codecademy. It is time for you to learn to code. At least, start to sound like you care to your CTO.
• Coursera. Lots of career advancement courses. Like attending a Wharton course on marketing.
• Freakonomics. Listen, learn and out-smart your clients.
• Google Online Marketing. Learn from the leader.
• The How. Learn stuff.
• HubSpot Inbound Training. The academy! Get on the inbound marketing bandwagon or, frankly… be left behind.
• Khan Academy. Free courses from programming to economics to finance to what you should have learned in the 8th grade.
• The Lean LaunchPad. How to Build a Startup
• Lyndia. Now a LinkedIn service. Yikes! Go forth and learn… 4,354 courses · 169,690 video tutorials
• Marketing @ TedTalks: Prefer video? Here are the top TedTalks on marketing.
• Mixergy. Entrepreneurs training other entrepreneurs. Or, how to start your own advertising agency.
• Skillshare. Courses designed for the creative in you.
• Startup Notes. Need inspiration? Hear startup founders tell their personal stories.
• Smart Passive Income. Let Pat help you leave advertising, and go live on a beach while watching your PayPal account grow.
• Startup Talks. More startup videos.
• Udemy. You name it, they teach it.

Online Legal & Finance Resources

• Agency Legal Protection. Sharon Toerek answers important legal questions like this: “What should we do to protect the agency during a new business pitch?”
• Best LLC Services: Need an LLC? Need a guide?
• Cornell University’s Library. Dig databases? You’ve arrived at a long list of legal databases by subject.
• Legalzoom. From wills (get one!!!) through incorporation (for your new agency). LegalZoom is the leader in online legal docs. They are an ex-client of my agency and I have been using them for years. Know what, way back when… they were a great client of mine and they loved to eat well in L.A.
• Docracy. Open source legal documents.
• Docusign. Legal online signatures. No more inky hands.
• Find Law UK. Employee rights for UK workers.
• 4A’s On Compensation Agreements. Read this before you marry that new client. Consider this prenup advice.
• Right Law. Employee rights explained. Yes, you have rights.
• Invoicely. You want to get paid, right? Here is the easy way to craft that invoice.
• Mint: Track your mega-bucks.

Life After Advertising & How To Make $$$

• Entrepreneur. How to start a business online. I know you want to.
• Ferris. Seriously – How to create a million-dollar business… This weekend. Do this from your beloved cube.
• Fizzle. How can you pass this up? “Excellent courses from real experts and a community of like-minded business builders.”
• Razor Social. Ian is another genius who will tell you how to make money from your blog. He does!
• Reddit. Hear your peers hash out what your life after your advertising career looks like.
• Small Business Association. The SBA to you. Your federal tax dollars want to help you build a business so you can employ your ex-ad agency friends.
• Smart Passive Income. How to build an online passive income business. Read every word. Listen to the podcasts. Take control of your life.
• Social Media Monitor. A vast resource for social media advice. use it in your day job too.
• The Social M’s. How to use social and guest blogging to help grow your business. I do. Read about it here.

Top Seven Twitter Tools

• Bit.ly. With a 140-character limit, you have to shorten any URLs posted to Twitter. Bit.ly does a bit more cool stuff. But shortening alone means you need to have this built into your browser.
• Buffer. Buffer is my number one easy-to-use scheduling system, it is connected to my WordPress blog to automatically send my blog post urls and a snippet to Twitter (and LinkedIn and Facebook). Importantly because I need to save time, it also allows me to schedule a set of  Tweets into the future.
• Canva. According to the Gods of social media, having a graphic will increase your clicks and retweets by something like over 1 million times, or was it a billion. Or, some crazy number like a trillion. Canva is a very easy-to-use web-based graphics tool that edits images that you’ll use in your Tweets and can even be used by your CEO.
• HubSpot. HubSpot is a very big boy. Its inbound software will help your agency attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. And, you can use it to woo new clients with your supreme inbound marketing expertise. As in, using HubSpot will make your agency a social media expert that actually has tools it can resell.
• Klear. Klear (formerly Twtrland) delivers social monitoring, influencer marketing, and competitive intelligence. Try it out for free. The full plate is a bit expensive. But, it works as a smart business development tool. You gotta spend money to make money.
• Twitonomy. Use Twitter as a competitive wrench. As Twitonomy says, “Get detailed and visual analytics on anyone’s tweets, retweets, replies, mentions, hashtags… Browse, search, filter and get insights on the people you follow and those who follow you.” Damn, go forth and use your competitor’s data against them, um, for you!

Top Advertising And Design Awards

• Top Advertising Awards List. A Lovely List Of The Top Advertising Awards. And deep thoughts on why you should not bother doing the advertising award game – unless you have this strategy.

Marketing & Advertising Podcasts

• Best Podcast List. Yes, I really like this list.
• List of the Best Advertising Podcasts. Just do it.

Marketing Tool Generators

• Brand Genie. Your new brand in minutes.
• 13 Creative Ways To Find Blog Post Ideas. Super smart list from Authority Hacker.
• HubSpot Blog Topic Generator. Need some topics…?
• Meme Generator. I’ve OD’d on memes but maybe not the world.
• Icon Fonts Generator. Need fonts, icons, no time? Here you go.
• Ookla SpeedTest. I travel a lot so I am often in strange places with somewhat scattered Internet service. Um, like my house in Mexico. To check speeds, I use Ookla’s Speed Test.

Remember, Please Let Me Know If This Advertising Agency Resource List Needs To Be Updated

Need a Human Advertising Agency Resource? Let’s talk about growing your advertising agency. You are in a hurry, right?

Contact me now and take me up on my impossible to refuse a 15-minute Vito Corleone offer. I guarantee you will get at least one actionable business development idea.

I could even tell you why and how you could create an omnibus (and SEO friendly) list like…. my Advertising Agency Resource List.