Advertising Agency: the Specific Features of Working in a Competitive Digital Environment

The article is devoted to changes in the advertising market in the field of relationships between its main subjects. The author systematizes the problems that have intensified in connection with sanctions, restrictions and the global crisis caused by the global course of the pandemic 2020–2021. The research focuses on the advertising agency, its new role and functionality. Particular attention is paid to the agency’s work in the most dynamic segment of the advertising market – digital, and new tools, formats and technologies used in agency work. The study reveals a set of problems that arise in the digital environment and are associated, on the one hand, with man-made causes and features of information technologies 3.0, which are not so easy to adapt to solve marketing problems, and on the other hand, with the problems of communication management and updated agency functionality. Such a characteristic feature as transparency, which initially, at the dawn of the digital communication era, was a serious competitive advantage compared to classic advertising media, has now almost disappeared. This limits the possibilities for cooperation between advertisers, advertising distributors, and advertising producers. The movement towards transparency should be supported both at the macro-level of the industry and at the micro-scale of the individual agency, in order to help the agency business maintain its key role in the advertiser’s business and not push it to directly cooperate with advertising carriers, which will lead to a loss of content quality and media placement. In digital communications, the differentiation between the tasks of consistently strengthening the brand value and the tactics of quick advertising for immediate purchase is very serious, since these tasks are solved by completely different – not overlapping-tools. The authors consider integrated marketing in the digital environment as the implementation of the agency’s functions of planning, selecting promotion channels in accordance with the tasks set, budgeting, monitoring efficiency and building work with the subjects of the communication market.