As media owners increasingly initiate convergence-style communications campaigns, there is a possibility that both agencies and production companies caught flatfooted could find themselves on the outside looking in.

By definition, convergence strategies are driven by content produced for and promoted across multiple media platforms.

In some cases, that content will be a feature film as is the case with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which was produced by Warner Bros. and which parent AOL Time Warner is promoting across its media channels, including magazines, cable outlets and Internet properties.

Media owners are also exploring the potential of print and broadcast as content drivers. In Canada, several media companies have announced or appear to be readying such initiatives.

CanWest Global launched the first Canadian foray earlier this year with a program for Royal Bank of Canada that examined Canadian attitudes toward a range of issues, including education and the political landscape. CanWest’s print, Web and broadcast news outlets produced editorial content including feature segments on Global TV’s supper-hour newscasts and a half-hour program on specialty channel Prime.

The problem for producers is that while such initiatives can eat into a marketer’s broadcast media buy, there is little true spot production required.

‘That’s not a commercial production in a true sense,’ says Jack Tomik, senior vice-president CanWest media sales. ‘Those kinds of production jobs would and should and are being done at the station level because it is about content more than selling a box of Tide.’

But as Hugh Dow, president of M2 Universal, points out, such programs do alter media-buying decisions. After all, companies launching these campaigns have a finite marketing budget. ‘It does change the whole decision-making process as to the media mix. There’s no question about that,’ says Dow, who helped develop the RBC campaign.

Meanwhile, CanWest continues to produce promotional spots in-house around these programs, leaving very little for the traditional commercial producer.

But Dow points out that such initiatives will only make sense to a handful of advertisers, those with large marketing budgets used to dealing across a variety of media platforms.

‘There are probably 20 or 25 advertisers that convergence really makes sense for. But admittedly they are the larger advertisers,’ says Dow.

Another media company that appears ready for its own initiative is Corus Entertainment, which has recently taken measures to centralize its vast operations. The vertically integrated company owns a range of specialty channels, radio stations, publishing houses and animation studio Nelvana. It is also majority controlled by Calgary-based cable company Shaw Communications.

Through its youth specialty property YTV, Corus has also been producing TV spots for the past several years. YTV formalized its commercial production abilities earlier this fall, dubbing the division Pester Productions, with a focus on developing multi-platform, youth-focused communications.

‘It’s more a specialty positioning because you get to know that audience demographic extremely well,’ says Tim Cormick, director of co-marketing, Corus Entertainment, television. ‘Does it apply to other opportunities within Corus? Stay tuned.’

Last year Corus also established its Sponsorship Plus division to help marketers develop approaches to product placement or building programs around a brand, strategies that effectively cut the commercial producer out of the equation.

But such developments will not only hit commercial production. Agency business could also feel the effects.

Certainly Frank Palmer, CEO of Vancouver-based Palmer Jarvis DDB, wouldn’t be surprised if media outlets began to bring more creative in-house.

He says there is a level of frustration among media owners who have had their convergence strategies rebuffed at the agency level.

‘I don’t fault them on this one,’ he says. ‘[Media owners] walk into an advertising agency and they end up dealing with some fresh-faced 25-year-old who says, ‘No I’m not taking that to the client. It doesn’t sit with our plans.’ But it may be, in this case, a good deal for the client,’ says Palmer, who nonetheless believes that good agencies are up to speed and can help develop these programs with their clients.

MacLaren McCann, for example, created a handful of spots that ran in conjunction with the RBC campaign. The spots were produced by Toronto’s untitled and directed by John Mastromonaco.

More so, Michael Schwartz, executive producer at Avion Films in Toronto, says production companies have the capability to step in and provide quality program content head and shoulders above what a broadcaster can develop.

He says Avion is close to signing its first deal for a branded TV program in partnership with an unnamed ad agency, while sister commercial prodco Generator Films already has several in the pipe.

‘The big [broadcast] companies have never been able to provide consistent quality,’ he says.

‘They may be able to cover off the extreme low ground where the quality of the work and the writing and the rest of it isn’t that significant. But if clients are looking for anything that is going to make them look good, I don’t think they’re going to get it from these big companies.’

While news-based content is best left to the networks and specialties, there is no reason to believe that broadcasters that do not own separate production houses can produce top-quality programming.

Kevin Shea, group executive vice-president, convergence, at Bell Globemedia, says both agencies and production companies are safe in this new multi-platform, content-driven world, providing they can adapt beyond the 30-second spot model.

‘The reality is that in these convergence campaigns there are a number of partners. One has to facilitate and balance a whole bunch of creative needs and objectives of a variety of different partners,’ he says.

‘An independent producer is much more used to dealing with having to please a variety of different factions. The only gig they’ve got is the one in front of them. They just tend to be a bit quicker off the mark.’