Publishers Are Making The Ads Now Too
Publishers have offered to make the creative for years. It was a courtesy at the bottom of a rate card, usually taken up by advertisers too small to have an agency, and nobody in the agency business treated it as competition worth naming. The economics underneath that courtesy have changed, and so has what it is for.
The economics underneath that courtesy have changed, and so has what it is for.
Why publishers are moving on creative
Because they have the two things that were previously missing. Production is now cheap enough to offer at no visible cost, and they hold performance data on which creative actually works in their own environment, which an agency does not.
That second point is the real move. A publisher saying it can make the asset is unremarkable. A publisher saying it knows which asset performs on its own inventory and will make that one is a different proposition entirely.
The pitch is no longer we can make it. It is we know what works here and you do not.
What the advertiser gains and loses
Gains speed, fit and usually a better rate on the media. Loses independence of judgement, because the party recommending the creative approach is the party selling the space it will run in.
That conflict is old and well understood in media buying. It is newer in creative, and it is not yet being managed as carefully.
Where this leaves agencies
Squeezed on adaptation and unaffected on the part that was always the argument. A publisher can optimise a message for its own environment. It has no view on what the brand should stand for across all the environments it is not selling.
Agencies that have let their offer drift towards making assets will feel this first and hardest.
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