DDB's Bunnett hails value of production experience

Chris Bunnett came on holiday to the UK in the 1980s, and never went home. Cast your mind back if you will to 1986 and the launch of Eddie Shah’s Today newspaper – the UK’s first to be published in colour. Bunnett, a tall and genial South African, had his first job in the UK there and then, as a scanner operator. He moved from there to what became the Wace Group, but was still looking to travel more.

“I was only here on holiday!” he recalls with a laugh. “I kept resigning and they kept offering me more interesting things to do. I was thinking, okay if I learn this here in England then I can
use it anywhere in the world. I was probably aiming at getting to Australia at that point.”

Instead, he’s still using his painstakingly compiled production and systems knowledge here in the UK, and Omnicom-owned ad agency DDB London is the latest to benefit from it. Bunnett’s current role as integrated systems director has been something of a departure for him in fact: instead of being required to implement systems to carry out production, the DDB requirement has been for systems to manage production, and in fact manage the whole agency process.

Another of Bunnett’s former jobs was as a systems director at production company Tapestry (before the buy-out by Mullis Morgan that saw the company become Tapestry.MM), and this, it transpires, was the root of his arrival at DDB London.

“The reason for me coming here was that the software the agency had bought was an offspring of something I had commissioned at Tapestry for my own use – the Pelagon Spinnaker system,” relates Bunnett. This ‘activity management system’ has been rolled out across DDB and is being integrated with the agency’s financial system. Bunnett has also advised on implementing the Odystar prepress workflow software, which will be integrated with the agency management system in turn. Vio’s Composer is used for automating ad production processes.

Aside from these, Bunnett’s time at DDB has been consumed with the creation of a new way of working for one of the agency’s biggest clients – the electronics giant Philips. DDB won the account to handle all of Philips’ global production in 2005, and the requirements of the client have been groundbreaking in terms of an agency/client relationship, Bunnett says. It saw the creation at DDB of the Central Implementation Department, in which customer relations staff became responsible for establishing relationships with Philips staff around the world and liaising over activities such as language translation – more of a global production co-ordination department, ahead of production itself.

“This is very definitely a new way for agencies to handle client work,” says Bunnett. “You could argue that it had to be, but it definitely was, and it’s really how these big global accounts should be handled and how all global advertising should be done. It has been a hugely successful process, and with that in mind London is the only place to do it, because it is very agnostic about languages and timezones.”

Beyond that, it also required a very different costing structure for the agency: one that had repercussions deep within the production processes that the agency – any agency with production, arguably – might routinely carry out.

Bunnett continues: “Philips demands activity-based costing. They wanted to know exactly how much it cost for something to be done. Every activity in the process could be charged differently. Rather than £400 for an A4 advert, it was broken down to things like £15 for a phone call. Then Philips could look at automating things to reduce costs. That was the biggest breakthrough.

“The other part they drove home was the idea of cost transparency; no mark up, but a fair price that could be agreed. They said, ‘you just tell us exactly what it costs and we will pay you enough plus profit’. That was brand new, especially in our industry: to have someone say it must be absolutely transparent.”

Clearly the implementation of the agency management system was therefore well timed in that it provided a formal requirement to record activities. The question of what such a client directive means in practical terms for production staff draws an interesting response that it seems Bunnett instinctively relates to production companies in general.

“What does it mean for production people? That they don’t do things they don’t get paid for,” says Bunnett. “The problem is that production companies keep doing work they’re not paid to do. If the client wants one PDF and a proof, don’t give the client two proofs. Often in these production companies, the sales staff are rejecting the colour before a client even sees it, so five proofs are being made, but the client only ever sees one.”

Implementing existing colour standards should reduce this practice. Bunnett expresses a similar level of exasperation at the vogue for added-value applications such as digital asset management to be provided to clients free of charge. “I’m so fed up with people throwing asset management in for nothing. Why are we so insistent on giving our clients things for free?” he demands. “We are our own worst enemies, and then we moan about prices. It has got to the point where clients have started expecting it.”

He points out that the arrangement with Philips was not built along these lines however; Philips already had a DAM system in place in any case, and Bunnett says the driver for the client was finding production efficiencies, with reduced costs being a welcome side effect to that. “They are a very process-orientated decision making organisation,” says Bunnett.

The agency itself would benefit from a more formalised approach to digital asset and document management, he continues, and on a global level a project team is looking at the options. Like the agency management system, Bunnett sees asset and document management as providing “a big win for overall agency efficiency”, which would “take hours out of the day”.

Bunnett has written in PMM in the past (PMM April 2007), in his role as a committee member of the Digital Ad Lab, that as the number of media outlets proliferate, and the complexities of managing advertising schedules rise accordingly, there will be increasing importance for production professionals to take on a role of “super-librarian”, to which, he contends, they are uniquely suited. It’s a subject he returns to, and goes further with, when considering the future of creative services departments within the agency arena, saying:

“Creative services is great; I think it becomes increasingly necessary, not less so. With the plethora of media, agencies really need someone watching it. If I could do anything to project management in the agency I would make it much more client-facing than it is. DDB is trying, and Mother has as well. That client role is important. There’s no reason why creative people cannot be organised, so I think creative services has a huge part to play. Agencies would be very wrong to get rid of it because so much time is wasted just looking for things.”

Likewise, print retains its importance in the advertising mix at DDB, though Bunnett admits it sometimes “struggles to get its voice heard above online”.

“We have two print buyers in-house, and some clients that are massively involved with print, so print media is a very big part of the agency’s life and rightly so,” he states. Most of the production is handled in-house by Omnicom’s own production facility, The Hub Plus, which is also highly commercially aware.

The other burning issue for Bunnett is soft proofing, for so long talked about, but with comparatively little actual uptake. It is still a coming technology, and all that is required is a change in culture, which Bunnett believes is inevitable, despite there being little serious discussion of it within DDB London yet it seems.

“Soft proofing will take over everything, and we just better get to grips with it now,” he begins. “From an agency/client point of view I can’t see why you would be talking about anything else now. It’s not happening here yet, but it will, and it will come from the client more than anything. Procter & Gamble has made a deal with Adstream and is handling all the colour within that.

“When the client starts saying ‘I don’t want a hard copy proof; I don’t get them from repro any more, I just want it on screen’, that’s when it will come in here. There will need to be a discussion though, because until now we have charged £50 for a proof, and we sold it to them as if all that money was in the proof, and not the man or the machine that we will still have; so the client will want all of that £50 back.”

It’s a conversation that will be no holiday for agencies, but more than 20 years after arriving from South Africa to travel, Bunnett will be accustomed to that.