Agencies facing multiple pressures including recession and the demands of clients for more innovative solutions are asking ever more from their young producers. Winston Binch, VP/managing director of interactive at Crispin Porter + Bogusky talks about how an agency at the edge of innovation tackles the challenges of training and retaining interactive and digital agency producers and how they structure their production departments to best address them.

For the broader Topic story from the latest issue of Boards on whether agencies are failing young producers, click here.

Various EPs have expressed concerns about young producers not being adequately trained due to cutbacks, senior staff leaving, heavier workload and a wealth of new media platforms. Do you think there's a problem with that and if so, why?

There are always staffing challenges in this business, cutbacks or not. There's a shortage of interactive leaders and great, developed talent across the industry, and a majority of the learning still happens on the job, particularly for producers. It can be argued that the best way to learn and get good at something is just to do it, but when all of your junior people lack the basic skills to hit the ground running, you're bound to have management issues.

Producing interactive at a high-level requires strong project and personality leadership skills, proven problem-solving and creative ability, experience leading development of RIA, emerging technology, and video projects, patience, and street smarts. A lot to ask of inexperienced producers. That's one reason why we start most of our junior production talent as workflow coordinators where their primary responsibilities are to support the production process and assist our executive and senior producers. This gives them the opportunity to learn the basics of production, project leadership, interactive, and the dynamics of the agency, before having to lead client projects.

This has helped us manage scale, build a strong and unique department culture, and equip our young producers with many of the tools required to do the job. But it's not a cure all. Capacity is still an issue, and we need more developed, young talent that we can immediately insert into complex and creative interactive projects. Inter-agency education and talent development programs are a must, but they will only get you so far. We need a new and more evolved digital media workforce. That requires more investment in integrated, digital education programs like the University of Colorado and MDC partners' boulder digital works. Additionally, agencies have to get more creative about how they access and engage talent. In addition to working with various educators, we expanded to Sweden this year, a hothouse for digital talent, and now are experimenting with crowdsourcing on few projects. For us there's no one simple solution, and the best strategy is try a little of everything, optimize, and create momentum around what's working.

Crispin recently lost 60 people, how do you cope with losses like that while making sure young producers aren't susceptible?

Whenever people leave the agency, it means there's more opportunity for those that are still here. They can take on bigger work challenges and have the chance to become more visible leaders within the agency and with our clients. There are plenty of personal success stories that prove this true.

What's the progression timescale for associate producers to become full up producers?

It's about performance and attitude not time. We have annual performance reviews, but we sometimes promote junior producers before a year's time, and then sometimes it's much longer than that. We pride ourselves on being a meritocracy. If there is high demand for your services, and you get recognized by the culture as a positive influence on the people and work around you, you'll be eligible for promotion regardless of the length of your tenure.

Crispin's very much at the forefront of new media innovation: how do you keep the production department abreast of new tech?

We have an internal, emerging technology blog, and there's a lot of knowledge sharing that goes on between our interactive teams and throughout the agency, but it really starts for us at the recruiting level. We look for people who love making things, live and breathe digital media technology, and who are looking to fulfill a passion not find a day job. When you get those type of people into production, they do a pretty good job of keeping themselves ahead of the emerging technology curve on their own through things such as RSS, technology blogs, design sites, and Twitter, to name a few. We also have 50, in-house technical developers, and a big part of their job is ensuring that the agency is always at the forefront of digital innovation. They sit in the creative department, and this helps us keep technology in the creative discussion. Through proximity we all get smarter.

How are Crispin's production departments organized? Is digital integrated into broadcast and print?

At CP+B,we have two main production groups: integrated production and production solutions.

Integrated production includes interactive, video, music, radio, experiential, production services, and internal productions (in-house video production and post). Production solutions includes art buying, print production, traffic, digital studio, and DFX (internal retouching).

Is there any cross-pollination between digital and broadcast production? How do you broaden skill sets?

Everyone within integrated production sits together in both Miami and Boulder, and has the opportunity to and is strongly encouraged to work across media as it makes a much more capable, relevant, and intelligent producer. We do have some producers who only want to make software and others who only want to make TV commercials. And we support that. But we also let everyone know that the future leaders of the industry are going to be those that can execute and think cross-platform with particular strength in interactive. After all, the new digital ecosystem around our brands is an interactive one from mobile to social to live video steaming to augmented reality to e-commerce to interactive TV to product to in-store. Fortunately, many of our people are already functioning as integrated producers in the truest sense of the definition. And then it's about ensuring they have the proper mentorship through the process. But it's also about the ideas. The more interactive and integrated the concept the easier it is to push forward an integrated production agenda. It necessitates proximity, collaboration, and cross-pollination. The ideas ultimately create the opportunity. And then you just have to properly organize around them.

At least one EP told me that traditional producers generally don't transition into good digital producers - do you agree? If so why?

That's too categorical of a statement. But i do think it may be a little bit easier for an interactive producer to make the transition. Interactive producers play the role of both the agency video producer and line producer on all of our projects. In addition to managing creative development, they have to lead technical development. In order to do both really effectively, it requires honed project management skills and at very least an understanding of internet technology limitations. A lot of video producers have excellent personality leadership and negotiation skills that are generally better than the average interactive producer (in essence, they are not geeks), but they lack the core PM and tech training required to make a quick transition. On the other hand, interactive producers without any video experience also have a learning curve, but they go in with good organization skills.

At the core, it's all producing. If you're curious and can lead people, projects, and make difficult things happen,you can succeed in our business regardless of the media given a little ramp-up time. And both disciplines, though differences are easily apparent, can learn and evolve through exposure to one another.

Do you anticipate any collaboration with Boulder Digital Works to train Crispin's producers?

We're going to collaborate with Boulder Digital Works in a number of ways. We're going to teach, provide their students with internships, and also send some of our employees to their professional workshops. We're pretty excited to have such a great resource so close by that can help us further push interactive to the center of our business.

But it's important to note that BDW is an education program designed to serve the broader industry not just CP+B. The board of directors includes leaders from companies such as AKQA, Goodby, IDEO, Hulu, BBH, Hyper Island, Odopod, Oneriot, Media Arts Lab, Microsoft, and Tremor Media. Most of the students we hope will go on to have careers at the above places but also companies such as R/GA, Razorfish, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, and their own start-ups.

www.cpbgroup.com