Steve Clay of Mundocom writes ..
Award wins are more important than ever. Recognition for you, your work and your company is crucial. So with that in mind, and a fresh year ahead, it’s time to have a think about what will get you and your clients onto the winner’s podium in 2013.
Chances are ‘production’ is not the first thing that springs to mind, but it should be. Whatever potentially award winning work you’ve got in the pipeline for this year, get the production wrong and even genuinely game-changing creative will go nowhere fast.
Production pulls a project together – put simply it is the planning and realisation of the creative vision. At its best the production process is able, through a combination of creative understanding and technical competency, to fully develop and execute a campaign – bringing that brilliant idea to life right before your eyes.
All this hinges on there being a strong relationship between the production team and the creative agency. This must go beyond the standard ‘collaborative approach’ to one of ‘creative empathy’. The ‘strength’ of the relationship must be a genuine partnership for this to work. All projects bring with them cost and time pressures, it is the production agency’s job to mitigate these barriers and facilitate the agency’s creative and strategic plan for a brand or product. Doing this effectively and consistently gets you the best possible results.
Optimise budgets
When engaged at the right point in the planning process production can be the great enabler. The production team can help optimise budgets and ensure deadlines are met, allowing the creative agency to do what they do best – Create. Engage the production team fully and do it early, the sooner the better. This will allow you to focus on delivering the award winning brand engagement strategies and creative solutions.
Potentially award winning creative will often involve tremendous logistical challenges, as we saw when working with Leo Burnett on aspects of McDonald’s Olympics activity – one of the UK’s largest ever print and outdoor campaigns. Obviously tremendous planning and organisation was required for a project of this size, so we created a dedicated multi-disciplinary team to manage the production process from initial creative work through to digital and print-ready production files.
This kind of team structure is essential to effective project management of this kind. It allows the team to oversee every element of the process, in this case from the creative retouching required on the campaign imagery through to the production of 622 unique artworks, along with over 100 press ads. We also mastered, edited and delivered the digital huge OOH component of the campaign, including the Mexican wave that appeared across 9 large eMotion screens in Euston station.
By implementing production in the right way and at the right stages in the campaign everything was delivered on time and on budget, with the campaign helping to make McDonald’s the most recognised partner of the 2012 Games. A holistic view is important on every project, but especially on projects of this size and complexity, where a multitude of strands and stakeholders must be co-ordinated and managed. To ensure the timely execution of each stage, you must allow the production agency to really ‘own’ the production process. This starts with the initial visual and quotation and goes right through to the final asset production and media fulfilment. Failure to do this effectively leads to wastage, inefficiency and the wrath of clients. Get it right and you’ll be writing your acceptance speech before you know it.
Steve Clay, client solutions director at Mundocom