Making Contacts

Greetings everyone!

As someone who is new to the area and also trying to branch out into advertising work I'm wondering how someone like myself would go about making contacts in the industry. I'm sure a lot of the questions asked by more traditional beginners apply to me as well, but I'm looking for more specifics related to what I do.

I'm a Sound Designer and Musician. I've done audio post and music for films, video games and etc. but never advertising. Since I do both sound design/post and music, my skill set is (as it seems to me) overwhelmingly poised to doing advertising work, whether it be custom music or sound design and sonic branding for commercials, software, websites and so on.

I know there are a lot of areas within the non-film aspects of the creative industry out there that I can likely do very well at, but just need to figure out how to tap in to it. It seems that the film industry and the creative/advertising industry do many similar things, but are two totally separate networks that only co-mingle every so often.

What I'd like to know is what types of people/positions am I looking to contact and what type of material would you like to see, what are the expectations of someone in my particular position, do agencies ever have in-house audio/music positions or is it all contractual/freelance and so on.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your time!