The Guardian recently had a live Q&A on working in Advertising and provided this handy summary of the different job roles within agencies:

• Account management – maintains the relationship with the client. Is the liaison between the client and agency (working directly with all of the different departments in the agency).
• Account planning – responsible for the research, insights and strategic vision.
• Creative department – responsible for the creative work. Usually broken out into teams of art director and copywriter. There are also creatives who specialise in digital creative work as well as graphic designers. Most creatives these days take an integrated approach and work across all mediums.
• Designers – once the experience designers create the plan, these are the “interior decorators” who come in and design the work (along side the art director and copywriters who originally concept the idea).
• Experience design (UX) – these are the architects who envision and thus build (they make a blue print) the back-end experience of all digital/web content.
• Media – responsible for buying/planning and strategising where the creative content will live.”
• Production – liaison between the creatives and the director (TV), or photographer (print) and so on in making the actual creative content (the TV spot, website and so on)
• Traffic/project management – responsible for maintaining the work flow of the agency. Works with all departments (especially creative and account management) to ensure all deadlines are met.

For the full article: http://careers.guardian.co.uk/tips-to-get-a-job-in-advertising?CMP=

Don’t forget to come to Professional Connect: PR, Marketing & Advertising to meet York graduates and other professionals working in this sector! Week 8, Tuesday 25 Feb. See www.york.ac.uk/careers/events for more information.