By: Georgette Virgo
Marketing has never had more power—or more moving parts. With a proliferation of channels, rising creative demand, fragmented workflows, uneven partner models, and pressure to deliver measurable ROI, brands are being forced to rethink how marketing operations operate.
CMOs, CFOs, and procurement leaders entrenched in markops are discovering that a real constraint is the lack of clarity around how content is planned, produced, and scaled. Traditional production models, built for linear workflows, simply cannot match the volume or speed required by today’s market.
The Production Shift — From Fragmented Functions to Integrated Ecosystems
The core problem is structural. Most marketing organizations were not designed for today’s volume and speed, and as brands move from traditional linear production focused on hero campaigns to multi-channel, always-on models, this lack of integration creates significant risk.
Production models often rely on a handful of stakeholders that work best when connected — in‑house studios, specialist agencies, creatives, and even the tech stack. Without defined ways of working and decentralized models, content is often duplicated, total spend lacks visibility, and decisions are made in silos. Without a unified ecosystem, leaders struggle to understand which partners and campaigns are actually driving real value. The solution? Looking holistically across the 360-production landscape.
Experienced production consultants help brands assess and evolve their operations. Rather than looking at a single campaign, production consultants view efficiency across marketing activations as an ecosystem that can be assessed, benchmarked, and optimized.
“Our blend of global expertise and technology helps our clients, and their agency partners, work better together across their marketing investments, aligning our value to client KPIs,” says Edmond Handwerker, Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer of APR, a global marketing production advisory.
Handwerker points to APR’s Ecosystem Maturity Model (EMM) as an example of a structured assessment tool that evaluates brands across multiple dimensions — from operating model and governance to data, tooling, and partner alignment. It helps leaders establish a baseline, compare themselves against peers, identify risk concentrations, and prioritize improvements.
“APR’s EMM gives executives a holistic view into their marketing production and agency ecosystem, turning anecdotal complaints about ‘complexity’ into a quantified picture of where the system is holding trapped value,” says Handwerker.
How Production Consulting Builds Scalable Marketing Infrastructure
With visibility into the holistic ecosystem, brands have more opportunities to scale. Acting as strategic architects, production consultants serve as MarkOps mission control, helping leaders understand the most efficient and effective ways to transform their creative marketing production.
The best production consultants help brands define better ways of working, improve processes, and help create consistency across regions. They map workflows, standardize processes, and design governance frameworks that support speed without sacrificing creative integrity.
Production consultants also add benefit when they operate from a neutral third-party perspective, allowing organizations to rethink operating models without bias. An advisory model rooted in independent insights is a must for any brand seeking a transparent approach that helps achieve both creative excellence and cost efficiency. This creates a scalable intelligence layer for continuous improvement.
Data-Driven Decisioning and Operational Insight
Modern production generates vast amounts of content and data that is difficult to manage, but in many organizations, that information remains scattered across email threads, local spreadsheets, and disconnected tools. In the best cases, production consultants step in to ask the right questions and gather data that helps turn fragmented information into a true advantage.
For example, APR’s ACERO™ framework aggregates production data across brands, regions, and categories to provide a live feedback loop on global industry trends in spend, talent, and more. Through reviewing over a billion dollars of creative production spend annually, ACERO™ creates real-time industry benchmarks for costs (e.g., comparing the cost of a 30-second social asset in London versus Mumbai with granular accuracy), identifies patterns in agency and supplier performance (e.g., identifying which production partners are delivering high-quality output), and surfaces opportunities for consolidation or diversification.
“The winning formula for streamlined creative production entails reimagining and empowering the creative production ecosystem with rich data that allows brands to maintain market relevance and a competitive edge,” says Handwerker.
The Business Impact — Where Production Consulting Drives Enterprise Value
As marketing complexity accelerates, the true measure of operational maturity isn’t just creative output — it’s enterprise value. Production consulting delivers this by reshaping how organizations allocate resources, govern partners, leverage data, and scale content operations. When implemented effectively, it becomes a force multiplier across financial performance, operational efficiency, and creative quality, enabling brands to move from reactive production management to a strategic, insight‑driven ecosystem that consistently outperforms.
Financial: From Spend to Investment
When production consulting is implemented correctly, it does more than just bring cost savings. Crucially, the goal is not to simply “spend less,” but to reallocate spending from waste to work that drives growth.
Capital Reallocation: By identifying “non-working” spend—such as high-cost versioning or redundant localization—consultants help brands reallocate 20-30% of budgets back into “working” media or high-impact creative.
Asset Reuse: Planning for “liquid content” reduces the marginal cost per asset. Expert production consultants design systems that track asset metadata and mitigate risk, ensuring that a high-cost hero shoot is fully leveraged across global markets rather than replicated at full cost elsewhere or bottlenecked by an overwhelming volume of rights management.
Decoupling Transparency: Consultants can often ‘peek behind the curtains’ to note where decoupling creative development from production execution may improve fees. This transparency prevents “hidden” margins and ensures that brands are paying market rates for specialized technical labor rather than bundled agency markups.
Operational: Efficiency, Transparency, and Risk Reduction
Structural Agility: Consultants help identify which high-frequency tasks should be brought in-house and which specialized high-craft needs should remain with external partners. This reduces “agency bloat” while maintaining access to top-tier talent.
Risk Mitigation & AI Governance: In an era of Generative AI, production consultants establish the “guardrails of innovation.” Creating protocols for rights management, data privacy, and brand consistency while ensuring that speed-to-market doesn’t result in legal or reputational liability. Risk mitigation should be top of mind when considering adopting AI in creative production.
Supply Chain Instrumentation: Using frameworks like ACERO™, consultants turn fragmented production activities into a structured dataset. This allows procurement and marketing leaders to see a real-time “heat map” of spend, identifying bottlenecks and supplier performance trends before they impact the bottom line.
Creative: Protecting Integrity While Scaling Output
There is a persistent fear that “optimization” is code for cutting creative corners. Production consulting, at its best, does the opposite. Strategic production consulting acts as a protective layer for creative integrity, ensuring that the original vision survives the complexities of a global supply chain. Clearer scopes, realistic timelines, and better partner matches mean fewer compromises born of late changes or misaligned expectations.
Protecting Creative Integrity: By providing independent technical expertise early in the process, production consultants can ensure that ambitious creative concepts are matched with the right production technology and budget from the start.
Elevated Partner Management: Rather than treating agencies as simple vendors, the production ecosystem approach APR suggests works from a Preferred Partner roster. Consultants help brands identify where to deploy partners across the funnel, allowing creative agencies and specialized talent alike to focus on what they do best.
360 Production Ecosystem: When production is planned as a holistic ecosystem rather than a series of fires to be put out, the result is more cohesive brand storytelling and a higher standard of aesthetic consistency across every touchpoint.
Production Consulting as a Strategic Growth Lever
While no two marketing ecosystems are alike, production consulting can benefit any brand producing modern marketing content. For executive teams grappling with proliferating channels, rising content demands, and unrelenting ROI pressure, it offers a way to redesign marketing production as an integrated ecosystem in which creative, operations, data, and technology work in concert, ultimately unlocking trapped value.
Looking ahead, marketing production will only get more complex. AI will accelerate both the volume and variability of content, market disruptions will continue to test operating resilience, and stakeholders will demand greater transparency into how budgets are being deployed.
Brands that invest in production consulting to understand their production ecosystems now will be better positioned to harness AI responsibly, navigate volatility, and sustain creative excellence at scale. This builds scalable content operations that are not just efficient for today but resilient and intelligent enough to compete in whatever comes next.
