You are almost at checkpoint one, and almost done for the day. This means that by now, you should be forming a basic understanding of what we do, at least in a vacuum.
But we do not exist in a vacuum, we exist in an ecosystem, or an industry, with clients, agencies, other vendors, ad tech, and more, each with their own role and place in it. You will need to understand our place, and to do so, it is necessary to understand the bigger picture.
This section is designed to focus primarily on explaining a very distilled understanding of how our industry functions. It is by no means comprehensive, but should give you a decent baseline to learn from.
You will notice that just like our own history, in section one, the industry as a whole largely moved to digital at some point.
What stayed the same, is the existence of "advertising agencies." These are the entities that we primarily work with, and send us business, in return for us providing performance, reach, scale, insight, and ultimately, value for their clients. Ad agencies hold a fiduciary duty to their clients. Clients typically have one "media agency of record," or AOR, that handles the entirely of their digital media business. The agencies then buy, on behalf of their clients, from vendors like AMG. They have many jobs, but in this regard, their job is to thoroughly vet out vendors, and in the end, produce media campaigns that meet or exceed their clients' objectives on a given effort.
There are 5 major ad agency holding companies, globally, that are the big players in the market today. These are WPP, Omnicom (OMG), Interpublic Group (IPG), Dentsu, and Publicis. Each holding company has several agencies, across media, creative, strategy, operations, analytics, etc. Typically, each has a "flagship agency" that handles their largest clients. See this infographic for a comprehensive breakdown:
It might seem intimidating at first, but for now, you just need to know that each one of these holding companies is competitive with each other. Thus, it is absolutely imperative that you never, under any circumstance, share details (specific brand names paired with campaign details), proprietary numbers (spend, budget, performance metrics, impressions), or active efforts, that we are working on with one holding company agency, with another.
AMG works across all of these holding companies, and we are proud to maintain our Preferred Vendor status across most. This is a treasured designation given out to only sparingly few vendors in the entire industry, which we have earned via reputation and consistent deliverance of value over the years.
Occasionally, you will work on what we call "client-direct" work. This happens when a client does not have a media AOR, for one reason or another.
But most efforts are handled by agencies, which collectively handle about $70bn worth of US revenue annually.