ANA and AICP presented “Frame & Focus: Accelerating Production Partnerships,” the first in a series of educational seminars on Tuesday, March 31st. The three-hour event, held via Zoom, examined and explored how marketers could successfully work directly with production and post companies.
Matt Miller, President & CEO of AICP, and Greg Wright, SVP Brand & Media at ANA, opened the day by framing the stakes: the old transactional model is giving way to something more strategic, more collaborative, and ultimately more powerful for everyone involved.
Elizabeth Talerman, a renowned marketing consultant who with The Nucleus Group, conducted the study Craft & Commerce: Opportunities for Marketing in the Motion Image for AICP. Her sessions relayed some of the key findings, including that brands and production partners that build direct collaboration models, bypassing traditional methods, are finding they can protect the integrity of their storytelling while unlocking real operational value.
In the session “In Good Hands: Allstate’s Approach to Working Directly with Creators,” the creatives from Allstate’s in-house agency and their production/post partners brought “Action Hero” to life. David Hernandez, Chief Creative Officer at Allstate, and Sarah Lewis, Senior Marketing Manager, Allstate, along with Craig Duncan, President/Managing Director of Cutters Studios; Luke Ricci, President of RSA Films; and Vince Lawrence, Founder, Slang Music, walked attendees through the spot’s creation and the collaborative approach. Directed by RSA’s Jake Scott, the ad is part of the long-running “Mayhem” campaign.
Stellantis offered another model worth studying in its session “Stellantis: Decoupling Best Practices.” Cornel Charles of Stellantis and Tim Case of Supply & Demand, is a session moderated by Jillian Gibbs of APR, described how Stellantis began decoupling portions of its production process a decade ago, working with a rotating roster of production companies to achieve faster turnarounds and greater transparency. What started as an experiment has since become an evergreen program, and a blueprint for brands willing to think differently about supplier relationships.
A panel entitled “Designing the Agile Ecosystem: Flexibility, Control and the Hybrid Model,” moderated by ANA’s Greg Wright explored the architecture of what many are calling the hybrid model: a flexible production ecosystem in which brands toggle between traditional agency support, direct-to-production partnerships, and in-house capabilities based on the brief at hand. Leila Gage of Amazon, Todd Miller of Experian, and Abbey Scott of Wolverine Worldwide each brought distinct perspectives on how to build internal structures that support this kind of optionality and how to take meaningful ownership of production data and assets in the process.
The afternoon ended with a look at some of the legal issues that arise when working directly with marketers. In “Down to Business: Avoiding the Legal Pitfalls of Modern Production, Attorneys Jeffrey Greenbaum of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz and Roberta Wolff offered a candid look at the most common legal pitfalls in direct production partnerships, from business affairs friction points to the contractual frameworks that protect creative output. Agility, they made clear, is only an asset when it's legally sound.
Video of the presentations will be available to view on aicp.com in the coming weeks.