Creative Production

Reconvergence: Why Reuniting Creative and Production Could Reshape Agency Models

Real Value Not Savings

Incorporating content performance KPIs into the Marketing Procurement scorecard might seem outlandish at first, but as Bridges notes, “the work we make ultimately converts and performs [better]. That drives real value, not just savings!”

Industry Turmoil Threatens Traditional Agency Models

The agency landscape has undergone dramatic transformation in the last 18-24 months. Holding companies are consolidating to streamline offerings, exemplified by Omnicom’s pending IPG acquisition.

Meanwhile, AI integration has evolved from experimental to essential, with agencies restructuring teams and investing in AI specialists—as illustrated by The Mill’s collapse, showing AI’s disruptive impact on traditional VFX workflows.

Procurement pressures have intensified, with brands adopting hybrid models combining in-house capabilities with specialist agency support rather than full agency replacements.

Some clients are reconsidering complete production decoupling due to coordination challenges, creating opportunities for integrated creative-production models.

Simultaneously, fractional leadership is becoming mainstream, with brands engaging high-level creative talent project-by-project instead of through traditional AOR relationships, enabling more flexible engagement models.

The shift in advertiser’s appetite for content is driving changes too. Broad awareness TV campaigns are in decline, replaced by an insatiable need for growing volumes of highly personalized social content.

Traditional agencies’ siloed working practices separate creative and production, and simply can’t keep up with this accelerating pace of content without heavy layers of account oversight and coordination.

Decoupled production is fine in principle, but the devil is in the operational details. Multiple handoff points, higher levels of rework, lost time and associated cost simply can’t keep up with the explosion of content, channels and platforms facing leading advertisers.

David Bridges will be speaking at the Marketing Procurement iQ Conference on 26 March in London. Book Now

 Reimagining Integration Through Reconvergence

Against this backdrop, CEOs of full service and production agencies could be forgiven for losing a little sleep. But for David Bridges, Global CEO at Wellcom Worldwide, the disruption presents an opportunity:

“[The] bigger agencies, [are] really struggling with figuring out how to be relevant and where their model is going. I feel like we’re well positioned to take advantage of those challenges… the turmoil and the chaos that’s going on in those big general agencies is benefiting us.

I think it’s forcing brands to open their eyes and look for new ways of working…It’s going to create the opportunity for us to get in front of people that we weren’t able to get in front of before.”

The secret to Wellcom’s increased traction is the concept of “reconvergence,” bringing creative and production back together to create streamlined workflows.

This isn’t a return to the past model of full-service agencies, but rather a reimagination of integration to meet today’s marketing needs of more content, more quickly and cost effectively, across more channels, and with ever greater personalisation.

Bridges’ belief in this approach is compelling: “If I were starting from scratch and I were a marketer and I really understood advertising and production and how the whole process works… I would build it just like this. It just makes sense. Everybody would.”

Inside the Integrated Team Model

Wellcom’s reconvergence solution leverages flat, integrated team structures through the elimination of unnecessary account roles and multidisciplinary workflows.

Assets are designed with production in mind from the outset, ensuring that every dollar invested by the client is directed towards outputs that will deliver ROI.

As Bridges explains, “We don’t plan in creative without planning production. We don’t kick off a project until we know exactly how every single step is going to happen from creative and design, all the way through to production and execution and delivery.”

This approach lends itself perfectly to content creation for inherently more KPI-driven and conversion-based social channels. Incorporating performance metrics into agile workflows allows for rapid iteration of more effective content, at scale and in any channel.

Cross-disciplinary teams are shaped based on the client need, and all team members are expected to become experts in the brands they serve. “When we’re working with a new brand, we don’t just onboard our creative or a designer or an account person,” Bridges explains.

“We onboard every single person that is going to have anything to do with the brand… Every single person will have that [brand] knowledge.”

In this way, all efforts are aligned towards brand objectives, driving maximum efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

 New Collaboration Models: The Fractional Talent Case

Wellcom also sees opportunity to leverage the reconvergence model through the addition of fractional senior creative talent.

Operating as consultants rather than agency employees, highly skilled Creative Directors can be brought in cost-effectively to a brand at a particular moment in time.

Brand transformations and private-equity backed turnarounds are ideal use cases for accessing top-tier creative insights without the Holding Co price tag, and it’s increasingly common for brands to call on fractional senior talent at such moments.

For Wellcom, collaborations of this nature have proved fruitful, with former agency leaders including John Staffen (ex-Arnold and DDB) acting as fractional Executive Creative Director and plugging into Wellcom’s agile team structures.

Together they can bring a surge of creative juice and a production powerhouse to leading advertisers when it’s most needed.

Speaking of the integration point, Bridges comments, “John is like a conductor, conducting an orchestra of people that are just making all of these different things and rebuilding the platform from a creative and production point of view for this brand.”

The Marketing Procurement Opportunity

To a production expert, the differences in resourcing mix between the traditional and reconvergence approaches will be clear, as account layers are collapsed, and more specialist cross-disciplinary resources are brought onboard.

However, prevailing fee structures, particularly deliverables-based pricing, have obscured the inefficiencies of traditional agency ways of working, so spotting and understanding the differences may take a little more work for those of us in Marketing Procurement roles.

Bridges advocates for a very transparent pricing model that firmly re-connects assets to the resource hours required to deliver them, believing this to be a source of client trust.

Marketing Procurement’s responsibility therefore is to develop a greater understanding of creative production processes so that we can assess the resource mix being put forward. We can then revise commercial agreements to better accommodate integrated models.

We also need a wider set of KPIs to measure impact, because there is a need to differentiate between cost-cutting in the traditional high-volume, low-cost production model, and the value-creation of reconvergence.

Leveraging lower cost production resources remains a core value lever, but practical benefits including faster turnaround times, reduced revisions and improved output quality also improve cost efficiency.

Incorporating content performance KPIs into the Marketing Procurement scorecard might seem outlandish at first, but as Bridges notes, “the work we make ultimately converts and performs [better]. That drives real value, not just savings!”

For Bridges it’s clear that Marketing Procurement can play a vital role in unlocking value by embracing the reconvergence model.

“[When] procurement people have more desire to learn about how work is actually made and what actually goes into creating all of this content… I think (they have) the opportunity to support their marketing partners in the best way possible.”

David Bridges is Global CEO of Wellcom Worldwide