An advertising manager is usually required to perform most or all of the following sets of duties:
- Preparing budgets and estimates for components of the advertising campaign
- Preparing or helping with development of the annual budget
- Managing the planning and preparation of promotional matter, ensuring that it is consistent with the advertiser's marketing strategy
- Meeting with clients and officials across departments to coordinate campaigns
- Scrutinizing, copying, and editing promotional material and ensuring it conforms to guidelines
- Forming and negotiating contracts
- Coordinating activities across the various departments of the agency
- Developing contacts for promotional campaigns
- Collecting and sorting information to build advertising campaigns
- Overseeing the results of campaigns to determine their effectiveness
- Keeping up with industry trends
- Acting as an agent for advertising accounts
- Supporting presentations and product demonstrations when launching new campaigns
- Motivating and mobilizing the campaign team to meet objectives
- Drawing up and implementing advertising strategies for companies and clients
- Engaging in public relations activities
- Training new employees
- Marketing the services of the agency to present and potential clients
- Conducting product research and development
- Representing the company at industry conferences and other events
Anyone applying for a job as an advertising manager must possess the following skills and attributes:
- The ability to write effectively
- A passion for helping people in the industry
- Strong listening skills
- The ability to manage his or her own time and that of others
- Decision-making skills
- Effective communication and public-speaking skills
- The ability to use logic to decide between alternative options
- Problem-solving capabilities
- The ability to be persuasive and motivate others
- Sufficient financial skills to manage resources
- The ability to coordinate and oversee the actions of workers to generate team effort
- A passion for instruction and teaching
- Negotiation skills
- Social awareness
- The ability to make quality-control decisions and evaluate systems
- Inductive reasoning skills, or the ability to link pieces of information to reach a conclusion
- Deductive reasoning skills, or the ability to apply general rules to particular problems
- Innovation and originality
- The ability to generate multiple ideas quickly by brainstorming
