Anyone working in the creative services industry, knows that one of the hardest questions to answer can be, “what does your company do?”. This is especially tough if it’s asked by a friend or family member who knows very little about the world of creative services. How do you answer that question while balancing the need to be clear and concise with the desire to convey what makes it interesting and challenging? This is the question of identity, and it is a central challenge of building a business, particularly if the industry you work in is not well defined.

Full-Service Digital Agency

These agencies excel at executing complex projects where many disciplines are required. These are often the largest and most profitable organizations within creative services. While they have all four service categories, it is often the advertising component that leads the business and most projects serve larger campaigns or a marketing goal.

Digital Agency

These agencies are similar to full-service agencies but most commonly they do not offer full advertising services. This means that they focus on building platforms or products over advertisements or microsites. These companies prefer to focus on building lasting relationships with clients and help them create and execute a digital strategy for their business. Digital agencies focus on Strategy, Design and Technology, and typically forgo advertising services.

Design Agency

These agencies focus on design and often work with external partners like ad agencies, consultants or engineers to fully deploy their work. They often offer both digital and print design services as well as branding specializations and sometimes interior and product design. As a result, they focus on Design services and occasionally offer some strategy services.

Interactive Agency

These agencies focus on building great projects for the web. They often are hired to create digital experiences that are a mixture of innovative technology, great design, and multimedia content. Although they are sometimes hired to simply create a great website. They work with ad agencies or consultants to deliver on a complex component of a campaign or a large digital project. Often these organizations focus on Design and Technology over Strategy and Advertising and have a great deal more production capability in the form of digital video and motion design.

Engineering Agency

These agencies focus on being technology experts. They offer engineering services to companies of all sizes, partnering with in-house teams and other agencies to build complex projects. They often work with many technologies and platforms and solve some of the most complex technical challenges. Engineering agencies focus on Technology services and often offer some Strategy services as they pertain to technology.

Advertising Agency

These agencies focus purely on marketing and advertising services. They prefer to work with specialist partners to build technology or complex design. They are PR companies, social specialists and traditional ad agencies. While traditional ad agencies often include many of the other services, they typically focus on Advertising and Strategy.

Consulting Agency

These agencies focus on strategy and big ideas. They often do a great deal of research and specialize in particular markets and industries. These companies can grow to become very large and often encompass professional and creative services under one roof. While they will often have R&D departments that include many other services, their key offering to clients is Strategy.

Design innovation

These agencies specialize in using design to solve big problems. They pair deep insight and industry knowledge with design thinking to create some of the most innovative products and ideas. These companies often include nearly all services in order to prototype and deploy their ideas but focus on Strategy and Design.