Evaluating Production Budgets with Agency Production Groups

For many years we have been working with ad agency or holding company production companies. Our usual mode of working is to review their initial estimates, then carefully discuss and negotiate the value of their proposed offering. 

Many of the smaller agencies offer a terrific value, often consisting of hands on, scrappy production approaches. Some, less so. Many larger agency groups seem to offer more specialized personnel, but overall not necessarily a greater value for the cost.

We recommend a normal triple bid scenario and not necessarily working within the agency’s preferred production approach, unless the value can be demonstrated. On several recent projects, our clients saved about 40% of production costs following this advice.

We have long seen agency / holding company production groups trying to control of who is involved in the production workflows and when, including production consultants. The goal seems to be to limit the production consultant’s scope, their impact on the production process and costs.

Overall, our advice to marketers is if you are working with an agency or holding company production group, trust but periodically verify the value you are receiving. The easiest way to do that is to ask a production consultant to take a look. There is a list of production consultants on the ANA’s Production Management Committee’s website or give us a call. We are happy to offer a quick evaluation.

Time to think seriously about advertising's evolution.

The ANA Production Transparency Report

The ANA put out a very useful production transparency report this month. If you haven’t had a chance to review it, here it is.

We are working with these issues daily and strongly recommend the guidance ANA suggests. If we can answer any questions or expand on any of these concepts, please contact us.

3 Key Ways Procurement Folks Can Support Their Marketer’s Ad Production Process

1)      Data Capture

2)     Witnessing Their Production Process

3)     Understanding Advertising Production Spending

We know that many advertisers are struggling to integrate their procurement departments into their ad production spending. Typically, for marketing, their funding is fiercely defended turf. However, in recent years we’ve seen management becoming more serious and demanding accountability on marketing spending.

We recommend data capture as a first step. This can get granular and the more granular the better but to begin with we recommend focusing on the big picture; budgets, vendors, schedules and final costs. Built up over time this data can become the basis for benchmarking and many other initiatives.

Becoming familiar with the ad production process clarifies roles, the decision-making process and the mechanisms for putting those decisions into action. It allows procurement to compare their current production process to Best Practices and understand the steps that may be required to get there.

Ad production spending has many hidden facets that can take many years to master. But just mapping the individual spend areas and tracking them holistically, project to project, helps clarify cost drivers and build awareness.

Brand teams struggle with an agency production group

A global advertiser asked recently us to review and make recommendations on production workflow issues with an agency (holding company) production group scenario.

The advertiser had an agreement to default to the agency holding company’s production group. When we took a look at the process structure they were following it was easy to see where some of the issues were coming from.

The production group was decoupled from the agency, this was a selling point. There were many potential issues that flowed from that structure.

1.       The project’s producer did her best but seemingly worked for the production group first and foremost, second in line was the client brand team and third was the agency creative team.

2.       The brand team’s relationship with the agency teams had become fraught as many of the production issues were being negotiated in their full view and with their participation.

3.       The production group controlled and minimized the relationship between brands teams and their production consultants. This was the first time I have seen this.

The production consultancy was engaged, but the workflow, sold and managed by the production team, had the consultant operating in a very narrow window of responsibility -- only reviewing costs. The consultants were not present the process from start to finish, which is our preference.

The client ultimately decided to hire an in-house executive producer to ensure that brand's concerns and expectations were met.

We were left scratching our heads with that decision because having spent careers as producers, project and production managers, we normally cover that role. C'est la vie.