The Production Industry Is Splitting In Two. Here's Why I'm Betting On Both Sides.

I recently had a very jolly time in London, going to back-to-back meetings and creative events. It was a great shot in the arm of energy for someone like me who works mostly on my own, but it also crystallised, in its intense social way, how my work as a "recruiter" needs to fit into the world these days and how I can evolve in an industry that is in such flux.

Every meeting, every conversation, every talk circled the same tension: craft versus scale, quality versus volume, the independent production company versus the global content operation. Gahh — whose side am I supposed to be on? By the end of the week, I'd stopped seeing it as a tension at all.

Orlando Wood of System 1 Group gave the clearest framing I've heard at the APA "Future of Advertising" event: Salesmanship versus Showmanship. Showmanship builds memory through compelling narratives, relatable characters, and emotional appeal — think Specsavers, think Compare the Market's meerkats, work that lodges in the brain long before a purchase decision is even on the table. Salesmanship nudges the immediate sale, targeting the small percentage of consumers ready to buy right now, the closers. Wood's research shows that advertisers have dramatically prioritised salesmanship over the last two decades, and it's to their detriment — only around 6% of the trillion dollars spent globally on advertising last year achieved the kind of emotional response needed for real profit and growth. Showmanship makes salesmanship work harder. The industry has been getting this the wrong way round, and for the first time it has the tools to start fixing it.

That framing gave me language for something I'd been watching happen in production hiring for a while.

I've started calling them the Premium and the Pipeline.

The Premium

The Premium is the 5% of work where execution IS the idea. High-stakes brand storytelling, creative vision, the kind of craft that moves people and makes them need to engage with a brand. Research consistently shows this is what drives long-term brand value, mental availability, and sustainable business growth. It will always need virtuoso talent, and it isn't going anywhere.

George Floyd of Academy describes it better than I can. Ravel's Bolero, performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. The director is the conductor — recruiting world-class practitioners, unifying them around a singular vision. The crew is the orchestra: the DOP, the production designer, the editor, the colourist. Each one a virtuoso in their discipline. Each one essential.

The EP or Line Producer is the concertmaster — first violin, the most senior player in the room, leading from within rather than from the podium. The crucial link between the conductor and the orchestra, translating vision into execution, keeping the ensemble unified, setting the standard everyone else plays to. Underrated. Mostly indispensable.

The wider production team is the rhythm section — keeping every specialist exactly where they need to be, on time, on brief, on budget, without ever breaking the spell. Without them, the creative masterpiece is just an impressive jamming session.

If one instrument falters, the illusion breaks.

It's a beautiful argument. And it's completely sincere. The epitome of Showmanship.

The Pipeline

The Pipeline is the 95% feeding the content beast — thousands of pieces across platforms, markets, and variants, where the question isn't just "is this beautiful?" but "can we deliver 10,000 versions of this without it turning to sludge?" This needs people who understand systems, hierarchies, workflow automation, and brand consistency at scale. Traditional craft expertise alone doesn't solve these problems, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

When a brand has thousands of product variants across dozens of markets, the traditional production model simply can't keep up. The creative role in the Pipeline is evolving from maker to curator. That takes serious skill — people who are commercially literate and genuinely fluent in the technology reshaping how content gets made and distributed.

Production that keeps a brand functioning across fifty markets isn't less creative than a TV ad that wins at Cannes. It's a different expression of the same commercial instinct. Both deserve the same professional pride. The snobbery about which one matters more is the least useful conversation the industry is having right now.

The industry is splitting because clients genuinely need both

The Premium and the Pipeline require fundamentally different skillsets, different business models, different value propositions — and critically, different producers.

Most producers got into this industry for the Premium, let's be honest. The great artists, the beautiful ideas, the craft. That's the headline appeal of production in advertising. But the market has moved heavily toward the Pipeline, and when the work becomes something you fundamentally don't want to do, the honest options are three.

Pivot. Learn systems thinking, data governance, commercial literacy. Become genuinely fluent in the technology reshaping the industry. It's learnable. But you have to want it.

Specialise. Go all in on the Premium. Accept it's smaller and more competitive. Be excellent at that end, not pretty good. There's no room for pretty good anymore.

Leave. Or do something adjacent — like me. Production teaches you to orchestrate complex projects with multiple specialists under brutal deadlines. Those skills travel further than most people realise. With a bit of hustle and genuine dynamism you can build something entirely your own.

What isn't a viable option: hoping the industry stays frozen in the model that worked for 30 years.

A harder conversation

If you're a producer reading this and feeling unsettled, that's probably the right response. Not because things are hopeless, but because this is a genuine fork in the road.

The industry has always been precarious. It has always required adaptation. What worked for 30 years wasn't what worked before it, and it won't be what works after. That's not a new condition — it's just more visible right now.

If you want to work exclusively in the Premium, that's a real and viable path. But it's a smaller market, more competitive, probably more freelance-heavy. Worth being clear-eyed about whether that's the version you can sustain.

And if the work is shifting toward the Pipeline and that genuinely doesn't interest you — the systems, the scale, the coordination — that's worth knowing about yourself too. Not as a failure. As useful information.

What's harder to sustain is the middle ground. Solid, experienced, but not clearly positioned in either direction. The Premium has room for the exceptional. The Pipeline needs a different skillset entirely. The space between them is getting smaller.

None of this is anyone's fault. And none of it is fixed.

The freelancer problem

Freelancers are the most exposed in this shift. No formal development access. No protection. No company investing in their upskilling. That's the deal — the overage in day rates is there in lieu of holiday pay, sick pay, and professional development. But they're completely at the mercy of which way the market moves, with zero centralised help to navigate it.

I'm not sure the current freelance recruitment model is serving them properly. I charge clients a percentage to make an introduction. Yes, I curate, yes I understand culture and the mechanics of a search — but to my mind that's just another form of filtering, and it's not a skill that's going to be mine to sell for much longer. It's a model ripe for disruption. I'm building something different — and I'll come back to that.

What the creativity research actually says

The most interesting thing I heard all week came from Morgan Whitlock, who made a genuinely optimistic point that I keep coming back to. AI is going to handle the versioning, the transcreation, the delivery at scale — it's already faster and cheaper than any human operation and only going to get better. And when that cost comes out of the system, Morgan suggests it doesn't disappear. It shifts back into Showmanship. So instead of the Premium being 5% of the budget, it could become multiples of that. The Premium and the Pipeline don't eat each other. They work together. Finally some optimism.

What this means for my business

I place the producers who change what a business can do — not just fill a seat.

I've noticed some recruiters posting lately about the market contracting, redundancies everywhere, AI taking over the process. The logical response to all of that seems to be: make yourself cheaper. I'm not doing that, because I've never been that kind of recruiter. I'm not a glorified CV filterer — I spend a significant part of my working week meeting producers, listening to what makes them tick, understanding what they actually want from their careers, and doing the same with clients. I build resources I hope are genuinely useful to the production community. The relationships come first, and the placements follow from that.

So when creative companies call me, the problem they're bringing isn't finding candidates — LinkedIn has millions, AI can screen CVs. Their problem is figuring out who they actually need. Premium or Pipeline? Craft expertise or systems thinking? Those are genuinely different searches, requiring genuinely different judgement, and the cost of getting it wrong is higher now than it's ever been.

My value is my judgement. I can read a brief and tell you which side you're hiring for — even when the company can't admit it themselves. I can look at a CV written in 2016 or worse by AI and translate whether this person has the capability you actually need. I can prevent the catastrophically expensive mis-hire of putting the wrong person in the wrong world. Getting it wrong in a stable industry was expensive. Getting it wrong when the industry is splitting in two directions is catastrophic.

So my rates aren't dropping. The complexity has increased. The stakes are higher. The judgement required is more sophisticated.

I'm not picking a side

The Premium will exist as long as brands need distinctiveness. I genuinely believe Orlando Wood and Morgan Whitlock are going to be right about that, and frankly it's what I left Wigan for. The Pipeline isn't evil — scalable content systems are what allow brands to function in a fragmented media landscape, and it's no less demanding or worthy for being different. Business is creative too.

When a client calls looking for a producer, my first question is always the same: what are you actually building? Be honest. Premium or Pipeline? There's no wrong answer, because the answers lead to completely different people, and confusing the two is an expensive mistake in either direction.

Both horses are running. I just happen to know the form on each of them.

NB: I use AI to help with spelling and editing. The thinking, the opinions, and the constant curiosity are entirely my own.