What Adland Can Learn From The TV Industry in 2016

You never see weddings in Venice. Only funerals. The only people who live in Venice are the very wealthy who don’t actually live there but visit for a few days a year, and the extremely elderly. New York is on the precipice of becoming a new Venice - both in real estate as young people and small businesses are priced out of the city, and in the world of production where we are finding ourselves increasingly priced out of using New York talent.

The paradigm in advertising for a while now has been to produce more content for less money per minute. This is nothing new and many studios have met the challenge of budgetary constraints, continuing to create high quality content despite budget constraints. Meeting this challenge while delivering at the ever-increasing standards of quality, however, has resulted in lower profit margins across the board, and “Made in New York” becomes less possible.

I don’t want to lead you down a path of doom and gloom though. What kind of year end/New Year’s article would it be if there wasn’t a glimmer of hope?

A way forward is to encourage agencies and brands to look ahead. Not only to the next quarter but to the coming year, making an evaluation of their production needs with a far longer outlook in order to create some economies of scale. Our clients can utilise a studio’s resources on a simultaneously larger and more efficient level. I think if we look to the model of television production, there’s a solution there. TV shows come in with the idea that 22 episodes need to be produced, and need to be produced as cost effectively as possible.

If we adopt that model to producing commercials and branded content, we can find creative solutions that utilise talents and budgets more efficiently. Rather than compartmentalising the award of one project, awards should be bigger and look at the scope of marketing to be produced over a longer period of time. A creative team can tackle a :30 spot while also working on a longer form web piece. This will aid in preserving the creative through-line as well as the economies.

We were all drawn to New York by a motivation to create beautiful work together. There’s already so much in place to craft winning content, and if we all can come together and be imaginative in our approaches, and investigate collaborative partnerships, we can cultivate a creative class for years and generations to come. We’ll continue to be a thriving creative city - not a museum on the water.

Angela Bowen is an Executive Producer at Nice Shoes Creative Studio