Lemonade is, the movie’s synopsis tells us, “about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.” Heart-warming stories about creativity post the creative department, we’re promised; the lemonade from life’s lemons. The movie’s premise starts with an unpleasant fact: 70,000 advertising professionals have lost their job in this recession, many in production. The grim Twitter account twitter.com/AdAgencyLayoffs spelled it out as it happened. Name any major agency in the US and chances are they have downsized staff. The lemonade for those lucky enough to still be employed is bittersweet: with experienced, big-salaried production executives being laid off to bolster the bottom line in the short term, what happens to that repository of production intellectual capital in the long term? Who will train the next generation of producers and what will their jobs be?

Against that bleak backdrop, Epoch EP Jerry Solomon blogged in late May that good agency producers were an endangered species. Understaffed and overworked, he said, production departments weren’t able to respond to the training needs of their staff. He cited one assistant agency producer, raised within a year to producer, who was unable to read a bid, just the bottom line. “They can’t defend the bid and the creative to do what’s best for their agency and their client when they really don’t understand the process,” he sums up, echoing the anecdotes of many.

“The jobs I get into the most financial problems with, or fail to maximize profitability on, are often the ones with the weakest agency producers,” responded Solomon to one commenter who slyly suggested that better trained producers might actually cut into Epoch’s bottom line. “We tend to allocate our resources in the wrong places, communication is slow and there is more indecisiveness. Give me an experienced, trained [producer who] understands collaboration any day of the week – the creative and financial benefits are countless.”

It was a damning assessment that sums up a perfect storm of factors that have stretched production departments to breaking point. In the last year, a series of high-profile moves to the vendor side have signaled the wider brain-drain of top-class experience from agency production departments: Damian Stevens from Saatchi & Saatchi, LA; Tom Dunlap from Deutsch; Matt Bonin from Crispin Porter + Bogusky; Matt Winks from McCann, San Francisco to name but a few.

Massive layoffs and hiring freezes across the board have been matched, admit many heads of production, by more volume of work across more platforms and iterations. Formal training courses are costly and time consuming. There is little time for teaching in an overstretched department and often with no one empowered to oversee that process, a de facto sink or swim regime reigns. Additionally, with budgets shrinking and margins ever thinner there is no wriggle room for mistakes, a natural by-product of inexperience in a work environment where every job is a prototype.

To add to this already precarious situation, some feel that producers’ roles have been diminished. “You’re really talking to the wrong person when talking to the producer in an agency,” said one EP, anonymously. “You have to talk to business affairs, to the lawyers and the account people. There are certain agencies where you don’t even submit bids back to agency producers, they go straight to the business managers. The agency producers don’t get a vote and don’t have knowledge; you have to go above them to get any traction. Producers are third-class citizens within the agencies.”

In the continuing evolution of agencies from full-service planning/strategy/buying/creative powerhouses to creative managers, agency producers have become an unfortunate side story, the same EP added. Execution expertise has become a secondary consideration, shifted almost wholesale from agency to production company. “Universally, agency compensation models have changed. [As an agency] you’re not making mark-up on production any more, it’s just straight pass through. Now it’s got to the point where agencies are no longer willing to finance the production on behalf of their client, they take the risk away, so the middle men don’t really have any authority.”

So what can agencies do to counter this problem? EPs and heads of production agree experience is vital. In a trust-based industry, creative problem-solving is a matter of who to speak to matched with a deep understanding of the production process. Those relationships and that in-depth knowledge can only be learned on the job, says @radical.media EP Frank Scherma, a former Chiat Day agency producer himself. “I remember a board would come across my desk and I’d say, ‘How the fuck am I going to do this?’ One of the reasons I’m with [@radical.media founder] Jon Kamen is that I’d ring him. He’d say, ‘Well my guy isn’t right for it, but here’s how I’d do it and here’s what I think.’ There are a lot of young producers who’ve become accustomed to looking up reels on websites. That’s great as a resource, as long as you’re developing relationships with EPs who you trust. That’s how you’re going to learn.”

Industry veteran David Perry, head of production at Saatchi & Saatchi, New York agrees young producers progress through experience. He’s also sanguine about the changes in the agency world. His department has suffered no losses, but is under a hiring freeze. He accepts that producers have less time to produce jobs, are expected to take on more work and are progressed in their careers faster than they once were. Nonetheless, he’s heard it all before.