Do Creative Agencies Still Need Production Vendors
Agencies can now make things they used to commission. The question is not whether production vendors survive that, but which half of their work does.
The split was practical rather than principled. Agencies held the idea and the client relationship. Production houses held cameras, crews, edit suites and the specific craft of turning a board into a film. Neither side wanted the other's overheads, so the line stayed where it was.
Which Work Agencies Are Taking Back
The parts moving in-house are the ones that were never really craft. Cutdowns, aspect ratio versions, language variants, still frames pulled for social, animatics that only ever needed to communicate timing. These were charged as production because they required production tooling, not because they required production judgement.
Losing them hurts, because for many shops they were the reliable margin that the interesting jobs ran on.
What is leaving the production vendor is the volume work, not the difficult work.
What Production Vendors Still Hold
A location that has to be found and lit. A performance that has to be directed out of a real person on a real day. A stunt, a food shot, an edit that has to land a beat exactly. None of these have got easier, and all of them have got scarcer relative to everything around them.
The Relationship That Replaces It
The likely settlement is fewer vendors on more selective jobs, briefed later and paid better per project, with the volume tail handled inside the agency. That is a harder business to run than a steady flow of adaptations, and it rewards vendors who are genuinely distinctive rather than merely available.
It also raises a question agencies have not answered for themselves, which is what they are still buying when they buy craft. That sits close to what AI still cannot do in an ad film.
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