The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) has taken exception to a report from the Advertising Producers Association (APA), which claimed that some agencies were ‘gatekeeping’ production information from clients.
Released earlier this month, the APA’s ‘What Clients Want from Advertising Production Today… and How They Can Get It’ included the thoughts of 27 senior marketers from 25 brands and allegedly found multiple instances of bad practice between creative agencies and their clients.
It claimed that it found repeated examples of creative agencies ‘gatekeeping information’ about production companies from their clients across the competitive process, as well as blocking their involvement during ‘key production meetings’.
Responding to these serious allegations, the IPA has told Campaign that it takes “takes exception to the erroneous idea of ‘gatekeeping’ in relation to the agency’s role in productions”, adding that agency producers are “brilliant” at managing the process.
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In the report – APA CEO Steve Davies suggests that creative agencies were increasingly turning away from specialised production houses in order to recoup as much of the clients’ money as possible: “A change that has been damaging for our members has been the advertising agencies they work with producing commercials themselves, rather than commissioning independent production companies.”
“The benefit to agencies, in the short term at least, was plain – they were dealing with anxieties about their business model, so trying to keep hold of more of the money clients paid them was a reaction to that.”
Countering the report’s claims, the IPA responded: “It’s the agency’s role to guide their clients on how many directors to invite to pitch, which treatments and budgets are suitable for presentation, which is most suitable for award, which meetings it’s beneficial to directly involve the director and production suppliers in and what pre- and post-production options should be presented to clients.”
“This is a total mischaracterisation of the situation. The growth of agency production studios has been largely driven by the explosion in Sdigital advertising, because those needs were often being under served by the external traditional production company market.”
