Publishers and agencies candidly discussed the impact of and potential solutions for the all-too-common issue of late creative, at iMedia's Fall Summit.

Listening in on a roundtable discussion on the issue and impact of late creative on Monday during iMedia's Agency Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, it was clear the problem is an "operational nightmare," for the industry, as one agency executive put it.

Late creative causes immense headaches for publishers and media agencies, and no one on the roundtable -- made up of publishers and agencies -- sees any light at the end of the tunnel until the industry can establish some basic penalty standards around the issue.

The executives agreed there is no consensus on the kinds of steps and penalties a publisher should take to deal with late creative, and publishers as a rule have been loathe to exact penalties from clients for delivering creative past deadline, as is custom in other media.

Practices now in effect include fines for missed deadlines on contracted campaign flights; running PSAs in place of missed creative, marking the missed impressions for the client who can take those as a tax write-off and running default graphics, sometimes employed for missed rich media creative, especially. As often as not, the publisher simply postpones the campaign in order to accommodate the late creative. 

The problems seem to be process-oriented, these panelists agreed. A campaign is planned and media is bought often before the reality of executing on the ideal creative is fully understood, and suddenly the whole creative process gets crunched, causing creative that is late, or arrives not to spec. Sometimes the communication breaks down when the publisher changes the spec and the agency is not aware.

With so many moving parts to executing an online campaign, each party to the process needs to take responsibility for communicating with each other right from the outset of the contract being signed. One executive at the table said her agency is taking the initiative with clients and publishers in establishing a production schedule and workflow process to ensure the creative comes in the way the client wants it, on time and within publisher specs, outlining as well the consequences for late creative.

"We have to stop being a transactional media business and start being more of a relational media business," said another agency executive.

It's important that there is a person within each agency whose core competency is being able to communicate and manage the technical and production aspects of a client's campaign with the creative team, the publisher and the client.

Likewise on the client side, it was recommend that clients be encouraged to assign a project manager for each campaign whose role is not strategic but very much process and production oriented, focused on executing the campaign against the looming deadline.

But the roundtable participants also agreed that until the industry establishes some standards on penalties for late creative, there won't be a compelling reason for clients to take the whole issue seriously. 

Kurt Indvik is general manager of iMedia Communications. Read full bio.