They pay the bills.
They're the ones ultimately responsible for the stuff on radio, television, outdoor boards, and in newspapers and magazines, because they're the ones who give final approval on all of the advertising. Their agencies are usually influential in those decisions. But the advertisers have the final say.
Advertisers, or clients, come in all shapes and sizes. It's safe to say that virtually every city, town, and hamlet in the country has a company that advertises, even if it's only a hardware store that runs specials on things that nobody really wants.
Most advertisers of any size have advertising agencies, and any advertiser big enough to have an agency almost always has an advertising and/or marketing department of its own. If that advertising and/or marketing department is big enough, it will have every department that an agency has, and sometimes every job that an agency has. It'll have art directors, copywriters, producers, and media, marketing, and research people.
If you want a job in the creative department of an advertiser, you follow exactly the same steps that you would if you were trying to get into the creative department of an agency, but instead of calling a creative director for an appointment, you would call the head of the advertising or marketing department.
You'll need the same tools, too: a portfolio of ten or so ads that you've created and a resume that quickly and clearly describes your background.
Most of the work done on the client side of the business is in the area of marketing, and most of the people who want to work on this side of business want to work in the area of marketing. There is no set way to get started in marketing on the client side: brand managers don't carry portfolios around, and advertising directors don't need a reel of TV commercials.
Many of the larger advertisers recruit young people right out of college. The competition for those jobs is steep, to put it mildly. Thousands of kids interview with the big advertisers when they're touring the campuses. Because of their track records, every would-be marketing maven wants to work for the big spenders, and because they're so popular, they can afford to be choosy. If you are selected though, chances are you'll be put through a very fine training course, with so many months in a manufacturing plant, so many months in sales, and so on up the ladder. Your progress isn't rushed, and you're watched all the time.
After you know the company's approach to business, provided, of course, that you've been doing well all along, you get a beginner's position in the advertising or marketing department, usually as a go-after. (Go after this and go after that.)
If you're good at running errands, if you satisfactorily perform the other simple duties which may be assigned to you, and, possibly more important than anything else, if somebody likes you and wants to see you do well, you could eventually get to work on a product or brand, usually for a brand manager, and not in a high-powered position.
It's a brand manager's job to see to it that the brand (specific product) he manages meets its sales objectives. It doesn't matter whether that means an increase in its share of market or an increase in sales within its present share of market. He expects the people who work with him, along with the advertising agency he selects, to help him meet those goals. If they don't, they're replaced.
It's like this, a brand manager answers to the advertising director, and if that brand manager can't meet his sales objectives, he's canned. The ad director will simply find another brand manager who can meet those sales objectives.
If that sounds like a harsh or cutthroat way to do business, you'd better get used to it. Advertising is a competitive business, not a charity ward. Big corporations are concerned with performance when millions of dollars are at stake, period.
If you perform brilliantly on the menial tasks assigned to you, there's a chance you could move up on the brand or brands upon which you are working, and be given increasingly more responsibility. If you turn in consistently stellar performances and impress a lot of people after what's usually a very long and challenging apprenticeship, you may be given a chance to handle a new product on your own. And brother, you haven't seen competition until you've been involved with new products. New products are a gamble for companies, and the pressure for success is intense.
If that sounds like the only people who make it to the position of brand manager or advertising director in big companies are brilliant, good; because that's usually the way it is. Large corporations have tens of millions of dollars tied up in their products. Stakes like that are just too high to trust to anything less than brilliant minds.
This is not to say that every brand manager and marketing or advertising director borders on genius, but they do almost all have a facility for getting things done, even if all they do is delegate authority and somehow manage to keep from being associated with a failure.
It's pretty much the same with smaller advertisers, too.
Smaller clients have their own way of training people, their own way of seeing if you can make the grade. If you can, you just might move right into a middle management position after a training period, because smaller companies don't have as many managerial levels as larger ones. Smaller advertisers have their drawbacks (if you want to consider them drawbacks), too. They don't offer as much money as large advertisers do, and they don't get as much publicity. However, even though they might not have as much money tied up in their products, every bit as much of their emotion is. They work every bit as hard as the large companies, and they are every bit as demanding.
