Production Leaders’ Opportunity is Relevance, Impact, Intelligence, But Efficiency “Quickly Becoming Table Stakes”

While production efficiency “is quickly becoming table stakes,” Publicis Production managing director, Neil Duncan, believes the reward is  freedom and resource to experiment.

“The conversation in the market at the moment is around automation and efficiency, and I think that is a critical first step – but it is not the end game,” he told LBB.

“The imperative of creating efficiency is what unlocks confidence, time, and budget, in many cases, with our clients. Once they have created efficiency themselves through partnering with Publicis, it gives them a bit of leeway to actually start to experiment a bit more with us.”

Production leaders should be thinking about how to create more relevance, more personalisation, more impact, and more intelligence, he argued. “Those are really the big opportunities that production leaders have facing them.”

As MD of Publicis Production, Neil leads Prodigious and PXP.

PXP was launched in 2023, with the vision of creating bespoke production solutions for clients backed by technology, including AI. These days, AI is top of mind for clients as well as Publicis, with Neil seeing the technology as “having a positive disruption on our industry.”

Publicis has been leaning into AI in recent work. In Philippines and Thailand, AXA’s ‘Bucket List AI’ helped audiences visualise the places they want to travel while highlighting the importance of travel insurance; Cathay Pacific’s ‘Every Moment Counts’ recreated Paralympic athletes' pivotal sporting moments in Hong Kong; and in Australia, Red Rooster used AI to illustrate 'The Birds & The Bees: The Unofficial Story of How Hot Honey Crunch Was Made’ just last week: a tongue-in-cheek, adults-only parody picture book.

Neil said the most interesting question clients are asking about AI is, “How do we make it enterprise ready?

“The challenge that we get to overcome, and I see it as an opportunity, is how we as production partners help clients with the governance and help them with the process to really make sure these are genuinely embedded into their systems, and done in a way that protects them and gives them the outcomes that they need.”

The holdco’s production suite also includes Publicis Design Ops, a proprietary tool built last year. Neil said, “Effectively, it's more of a design system that automates content production,” so designers can build “highly consistent, highly creative campaigns at scale across video, static, digital and print.”

One client stands out for its use of Design Ops: Suncorp Insurance. This year, Leo Australia launched ‘Suncorp Haven’, a first-of-its-kind digital tool giving Australian homes a voice on extreme weather risks, and providing resilience tips so homeowners can better protect their properties.

“They operate in a category which is highly influenced by natural disasters, and they do an amazing job of being there to communicate with their customers as events are happening, before events are happening and after events are happening about the impact to them personally,” Neil said of the brand.

“The benefit of Design Ops is that we're able to build a campaign and then iterate that campaign across the entire media plan as the message needs to change to best-suit the urgency or best-suit the outcome that Suncorp needs. 

“That's an example which is really pertinent, because it's where we're actually using technology to enable our clients to provide a bigger role or a bigger value to their customers.”

He joined Publicis at a holding company level almost three years ago, after 16 and a half years at its creative shop, Leo. He started out as office manager, had a stint in client services, and has held growth and operations roles before being appointed to run Publicis Production at the start of this year.

Across almost two decades in the business, he has seen production shift from being seen as a support function to being viewed as central and strategic.

“A lot of the conversations that I'm having with clients are very much at that front end of, ‘Hey, we've got this opportunity, how do we actually solve this through technology or creativity or media or understanding our audience through data?’ 

“We're having conversations at the briefing stage or even pre- your brief being formed, because they appreciate just how important the production solution is.”

That shift is also reflected in client expectations. Neil said a lot of clients are approaching the team and saying, “I see an opportunity” with Publicis Production, “but I just don't yet know what that means for me”.

“They may be very advanced in their own internal transformation, or they may just be very curious about what might be happening. But clients are really leaning in and saying, ‘Hey, can you just have a conversation with us, if nothing else, to help us understand what an opportunity could be and then how we might move ourselves towards that as a destination’.

“There are a lot of clients that I'm speaking to at the moment who are just curious, and then that curiosity often ends up in something more formal, a roadmap to innovation or a roadmap to experimentation. But, definitely, clients at a senior level are more just curious about the landscape, how it's evolving, what's next.”