Bill Bernbach, one of the greatest ad men who ever lived, said that if your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic. What he did not say, probably because it was 1960, is that hiring the wrong type of agency is the fastest way to ensure exactly that.

Picking the wrong type of agency for the job is one of the most common and costly mistakes a growing brand makes. 

A full-service agency and a creative boutique are solving different problems. A media buying agency and a digital agency operate in entirely different worlds. Getting this wrong is an expensive lesson most brands only take once.

Here is every type of advertising agency broken down, so you can stop guessing and start choosing.

You can have the best product in the room and still lose to the one with the better story. 

Bitter pill to swallow, but that is exactly why the advertising agency you choose matters more than most brands want to admit.

What an advertising agency does goes far deeper than making ads. It is the partner responsible for figuring out what your brand should say, who it should say it to, and whether any of it moved the market.

Here is what you are actually paying for when you hire one.

Imagine sitting in a cinema in 1895 watching what appears to be a real beheading on screen. The audience was stunned, not because the film was new to them, but because nobody had ever seen anything like this on it before. 

That short film was "The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots". It was the first visual effect ever recorded in cinema history. CGI came nearly a century later and took things a step ahead. It did not just manipulate what the camera captures. It removed the camera from the process entirely.

One craft learned to bend reality. The other realised it did not need reality to begin with. That is where the difference between CGI and VFX actually starts.

Just scroll through any major brand's Instagram right now.

That car floating in a white void. That perfume bottle surrounded by water droplets that are too perfect. That phone ad where the product appears to be suspended in space. None of that was filmed. All of it was rendered.

CGI advertising has taken over premium brand content so seamlessly that most consumers do not realize it. That is exactly the point. Brands that have figured out how to make CGI advertising are producing campaign visuals faster, cheaper, and with more creative control than anything a traditional shoot allows.

Here is how the whole process actually works.