Production Heads Debate Shifting Roles

Heads of Production Debate Changing Roles, New Types of Production Challenges and Recessionary Fallout at New York Meeting
 
by Anthony Vagnoni

The idea of how best to define the position typically known as the Head of Broadcast Production was the kick-off topic at least week’s Heads of Production meeting, held at New York offices of JWT and hosted by the agency’s Clair Grupp. 

Whether to try and find a standard or universally-accepted definition of the role of an agency’s Head of Production was widely debated.  While other ad agency functions have evolved with little change in job title, the distinctive title of the person who heads up an agency’s actual production process has taken on a variety of new manifestations.  

These shifts—emblematic of the changes in just what constitutes advertising these days—are reflected in the various titles in the SourceEcreative database, where the title Head of Content Production, Head of Integrated Production and Head of Film & Digital Production are becoming more commonplace.  In the process, agency production executives are struggling to find a new way to define what they do in a way that’s at once contemporary while still being definitive.

“Production is an honored term,” said Saatchi & Saatchi’s David Perry, “but somehow broadcast feels dated.”

The clear consensus of those in attendance was that how you defined the Head of Production role at an agency was a direct reflection of how each agency’s production process was structured.  In some agencies, Heads of Production are responsible for all the various genres of work, from print to TV to digital or interactive.  In other agencies, managing production is broken down by its distribution channel or platform. Areas of overlap—such as longer form web content versus thirty-second spots—have become gray areas, open to interpretation.

Yet all agreed that the role of an agency’s production department is changing rapidly. The meeting’s host, Clair Grupp, who holds a Head of Integrated Production title at JWT, underscored that by screening a case study for the group of a campaign the agency produced over the holiday season for its DeBeers client.  As part of the effort, public events were staged around Manhattan at which time-slice (a.k.a. ‘frozen moment’) video of everyday people kissing was captured—hence the name, “Unbreakable Kiss.”  The people photographed smooching were then able to go online and download clips of their kisses, whihc they could then email to friends, post to social networking sites, etc. The event brought out celebrities and news crews, and generated millions of dollars worth of free publicity and buzz. 

Grupp and members of her department discussed the massive logistics that went into pulling off the campaign, and how producers from both the print and broadcast disciplines worked together on the project. 

All agreed that work like “Unbreakable Kiss” is what clients are increasingly looking for in new business presentations.  “Three of these can be stronger than an agency's reel,” Perry said of the DeBeers video. 

The economy and its impact on client spending and production budgets was also a topic, as it seems to be at almost any industry gathering today.  More critical to the discussion of how the economics of the industry are changing rapidly was a presentation made by Matt Miller, president and CEO of the AICP, on the new payment schedule for commercial production proposed by General Motors for work produced by its roster agencies for its range of brands. (SourceEcreative will be publishing a viewpoint from Miller on this very topic in the near future.)

Miller’s presentation to the heads of production outlined the short-term impact of GM’s proposed policy of paying 50 percent of contracted costs for commercials sixty days after the start of the job and the remaining 50 percent sixty days after final delivery.  The possibility of this policy being adopted by other large advertisers, should GM prove successful in finding enough production houses to accept these terms, was also discussed.