In ClickZ's words, a group of "former big agency executives" is launching a creative shop that outsources the bulk of the production work to offices in India. Banerjee & Partners will be headquartered in New York City, and " interestingly " plans to do most of the concept development in New York using standard creative teams. The shop will do traditional and interactive work, and plans to be able to offer a competitive product in both channels at about half the cost.
Certainly, the writing has been on the wall for a while now that it isn't just manufacturing and low-level service work that can be outsourced. White collar jobs are fair game in any industry. There have even been a few cases of media content production jobs being outsourced to India, so it would seem that it was only a matter of time before the advertising side of the equation got its taste.
What does this development mean for the online marketer and ad agency? That depends on your angle - the creative department has historically been the whipping boy of many; constantly spoken of in terms of the 40 year old cliché about sandals and berets. For the crowd long looking to eliminate the surly bunch on the bean bags, this is encouraging news. It'll definitely make some think twice about rolling in so late after partying in their sandals till all hours (did we miss any of the clichés?) For those interactive marketers who believe online advertising is nothing but the media and media cost anyway, and that an optimizing machine can build adequate creative, this news doesn't change much.
However, if you believe that there is a difference between good work and bad work, this development should be a wake-up call.
To be fair, the entrepreneurs behind this venture do not want their product to be positioned as "the cheap shop", but rather they want to be known for their quality. They need to be given a chance to prove it can be done. With this in mind, let's be honest; a significant percentage of American shops, as it is, have already stopped using full-time production people on the grunt work, favoring temps, freelancers, and part-timers for the task of pumping out all the different sizes and iterations of the ideas. In truth, a brilliant art director probably doesn't need to be in late doing re-sizes of blinking grey-boxes for Internet accelerators on the night before trafficking. Banerjee & Partners is really not doing anything more than formalizing this handover in assignments.
For those who believe that the best advertising is a part of a holistic planning and production process, this is one more chip away at the dam. The outsourcing model seems ill-suited to any sort of collaborative process across the time zones and job titles; it is hard enough for many to coordinate campaigns with satellite offices one time zone away. Will the production people in India participate in the idea generation process? Will they ever really be team members? How do ideas make it from the production team back to those with the direct client contact?
More seriously though could be concerns about what moves in this direction will do to the long arc of defining and advancing the creative model in Online Advertising. Many debates remain unresolved on what formats online creative will ultimately take.
Online Advertising has been frequently criticized by top offline creative teams as either being stifling in format, or, too constrained in thinking to be of any real interest to them. Publishers are still slow to take on the big, one-off creative concept, especially when that advertiser wants to swing for the fence on a CPC basis. Don't forget that the hottest creative format of the last 12-18 months has been the text link!
Beyond that, as anyone who spends more than a few hours a day online can testify, the fact is that most online ad impressions are filled with dreadful, horrible creative at oppressive frequency as it is. he Internet is yet to produce more than a handful of truly memorable creative campaigns; might it not be too soon to hand such a significant portion of the creation process to a team so removed from the day to day creation process, and culture of production?
While the outsourcing issue is one that is very easy to demagogue, one has to ask some practical questions in how this venture will be perceived in the advertising markeplace. The most important and binding concern is whether or not top-flight creative talent in New York City be enthused to work in this kind of process? Smirk about the creative department all you like, but it is rare for the client or the account team to come up with the truly memorable, Super Bowl caliber work. Top flight creative people really do something that isn't easily to replicate or treat as a commodity. If you are good, and you can consistently do top-flight creative work, you probably have some flexibility in choosing where it is that you want to work. Do the top creative teams want to put their ideas in the pneumatic tube and be done with it once the ideas are fleshed out? Likely not. More likely is that the best teams are going to want a fairly hands-on approach to the production of their best work. Can Banerjee & Partners create a workflow that allows top-tier creatives the kind of working environment that will maximize the impact of their work?
Banerjee & Partners want to go into the market being known for quality, so that is the question they will have to answer. Given the kind of splash they have already made, it might be easier for them to go into the market as a banner mill (though that market seems saturated at the moment).
We at avant|marketer wouldn't venture answer at that question right now; but if it turns out that Banerjee & Partners can put together strong concepting teams that work well within this process, then they may have found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The idea certainly deserves a hearing within the marketplace.
And as with all things in interactive marketing, if it doesn't work, it will show up quickly, and will likely find itself "optimized" out of the marketplace as quickly as it arrived.
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