Featured article: As good as it gets

When Wellcom first started delivering production services to the marketing industry ten years ago, most of the business came from advertising agencies. That is no longer the case as the production landscape shifts and corporations take more control of their own production requirements. Michael Bettridge tells Patrick Howard how the demand by marketing managers for best in class providers has remade the marketing services industry.

It depends on what you are good at. Creative agencies are good at coming up with clever campaigns to take products to new market positions. Media agencies and strategists are good at choosing the best mix of channels to deliver some great deals. Digital agencies are good with social media, websites and winning internet space for the product. And of course, clients are good at knowing what they want: the best return on marketing investment.

No one is good at doing everything. Specialisation is the key to best practice. Getting people to focus on what they are good at is probably the most important role for the marketing manager who wants results. Which is why more corporate clients are taking control of their marketing budgets and seeking out specialist agencies to deliver best of breed services. 

It also explains much of the reason behind the success of Wellcom, the production specialists. According to Michael Bettridge (pictured), Wellcom strategy and global new business development officer, the motivation of corporate marketing managers to get the best results has seen them return to playing a more hands on role, seeking out different types of service providers. What today’s marketing managers do not want are creative agencies trying to fulfil their own campaign delivery and logistics at the expense of imaginative future strategies.

“Marketers want their agencies to focus on tomorrow. They don’t want the creatives entrusted with planning the future of their products distracted by working out how to deliver graphic files or prepare material for delivery across different channels. They want creative focus while depending on people like us to take care of the production,” he said.

Doing the media shuffle
The arrival of digital technology changed everything. It dismantled the old hegemony of the agencies that tried to do everything. In a multi-channel world, leveraging the same creative across different media requires specialised production knowledge. Maintaining essential brand colours and style across the internet, magazines, posters, television and mobiles is a job for experts.

This production services role becomes even more critical when you consider the rate of increase in the introduction of new products. According to Bettridge, there has been a 10-fold increase in the number of new retail products brought to market every year. This requires industrial strength production capacity in order to meet speed to market requirements. It is not something most advertising agencies are geared to handle.

It is a truism that ad agencies gather 10 per cent of their billing from production services. It is not central to their concern, not their core skill set, but it is enough to make them want to hang onto it. Whether or not this is necessarily a good thing for the client is another question.

“Media has been unbundled. Creative agencies should focus on tomorrow, that’s their role. The challenge of delivering material is about getting the most work done in the least amount of time. The best agencies know their own worth and in a multi-channel market dealing across eight media, not three, speed and consistency in getting products to market is essential,” he said.

The fragmenting media mix and the tightening of marketing budgets has increased the pressure on marketing managers to justify their results. Often now the role of procurement looms larger in the allocation of advertising spend. It is no longer acceptable for a corporate marketer to offload the responsibility for all aspects of a campaign onto a single agency.

The rise of small specialist digital agencies has increased the rate at which media is being differentiated. It is a move welcomed by Bettridge. “Digital has broken down the old boundaries. While perhaps the larger agencies are still able to handle some aspects such as television production in-house, most digital and media buying is now done by specialist agencies.”

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