Ever wondered exactly what a digital production agency does? Here’s your answer

Back in the boom of the dotcom era, the term ‘digital agency’ was virtually non-existent and the 90s were predominantly spent serving all aspects of the client’s needs — from servers, desktops and cabling, software development and websites, to digital presentations.

It was only when clients and other agencies starting becoming more ‘strategic’ that the original business model of what defined a digital production agency, needed to change too.

Essentially they become technical partners for clients and agencies needing digital technical skills like mobile and web development, social media and platform technologies for their campaigns and projects. Our strategic intention is to build successful partnerships with advertising, marketing and communication agencies to elevate their service offering through the incorporation of our technical knowledge-base.

In many cases, digital production agencies act as agencies for other agencies. UK-based agencies like JWTLondon, Saatchi&Saatchi, TribalDDB, TulloMarshallWarren and LoveEurope all use other agencies for their digital production resources.

The digital production agency provides them with digital capability in areas where they don’t have in-house resources and thereby help in delivering their digital build work for their clients. A digital production agency’s team needs to be highly skilled in all required technologies to deliver top-class digital projects. Much of its work will revolve around building technically-challenging projects or platforms for partners and clients across web, mobile and social channels.

Ensuring staying power

Establishing one’s base in a market and expanding from that is possibly a good starting point in this regard and obviously retaining and building good relationships with existing clients, goes a long way in building credibility and trust. One of the most imperative aspects of a good digital production agency is its ability to effectively translate the scope of work and deliver tangible business solutions at a reasonable cost, in time and within budget using the latest technology on offer. Your digital team therefore is important in this regard because the relevance of their skills in a constantly changing environment can set you apart from your competitor — invest in your people.

Being aware of trends in the digital landscape is key to providing a current solution that will take a problem forward and ensure its sustainability for a client. In Africa for instance, the proliferation of mobile has increased the demand for cutting-edge mobile application development. Also, web content management systems like Sitecore, EPiServer and Umbraco has also received a lot more attention because of the big data hype and managing data in organisations more efficiently.

Every industry has its challenges…

Understanding your client’s needs and delivering on their expectations can be tricky, especially when doing so remotely. At the best of times project management requires a careful dynamic of communication between the business and client, and if this is not adequately managed, then a project can go awry quickly.

Other challenges like scope-creep and immature workflow processes need to be factored into a project scope and risk-aversion strategies are built into a project programme to avoid problems which later, may not be easy to overcome.

But time and resources are probably to key challenges that are always considered when pitching a project. Skills are always in short supply – not matter what technological market you’re operating in. Retaining key skills is paramount to the success of a project and ultimately, a digital business. Differences in time zones affect a project, rescue projects require shorter time-frames and scope-creep affect planning. Without the adequate planning, a project is doomed for failure – being aware of these challenges can prevent that and ensure successful delivery of projects.