Ten tips for managing advertising production costs more effectively

It is interesting that 12 years ago when I started TrinityP3 (Simply P3 then) that the majority of our work was in Production Benchmarking and Management. In fact some of our earliest clients still think of us as production consultants. Today, production makes up less than 15% of our business regionally, but in the past 6 months we have had an increased number of major advertisers come and enquire about production cost assessments, especially television and digital production.

For regional and global advertisers there are a number of opportunities to uncouple or unbundle production to one of the global production companies like Tag and Freedman International.

But for local clients and international clients looking for delivering efficiencies and savings there is much that can be done on a local market level. But before you race off and start looking at strategic and structural production solutions, it is important to make sure you have got the basics right, which is why I created this presentation on Slideshare.

It is not that surprising the interest in managing production costs. After media, the next biggest advertising expense marketers and advertisers are responsible for is advertising production: –  Television, digital, internet, social media, cinema, newspapers, magazines, outdoor, radio, direct mail and more.

The problem for most advertisers is that this area of expenditure is often shrouded in terminology that is confusing, technical and potentially misleading.

We find that the top 4 reasons marketers end up paying too much for advertising production are:

  1. Poor planning
  2. Lack of understanding
  3. Not enough time allowed
  4. Complex and convoluted approval processes

So in the presentation you will find my ten tips for managing advertising production costs more effectively. What are yours?