Outsourz :: Quality Driven Low Cost Digital Production

Offshore Outsourcing to India - A shift in motivation

Benefits of Outsourcing IT

BPO - What is Business Process Outsourcing

Bridging the Cultural Divide

IT outsourcing 'to benefit from credit crunch'

Why We Have Nothing to Fear from Foreign Outsourcing

Outsourcing Overseas? Read This First

Challenges and Strengths of Offshore Outsourcing

Offshore Benefits with UK Account Management

Why, When and What to Offshore

As advertising budgets shift from traditional to new media, offshoring becomes an increasingly viable option. Take a simple banner campaign with its many sizes, variations in build specifications, multiple campaign concepts and possibly language translations. These can add up to literally hundreds of permutations per campaign. Add in Flash and other rich media, the inevitable client calls for creative revisions, individual tagging for performance tracking and the production requirement can soon eat into even the largest of digital agency resource. Digital newsletters and other forms of eDM with their complex HTML requirements can be similarly time consuming and expensive.

What makes banner and eDM production good candidates for offshoring is that they require less oversight from the creative director than certain forms of advertisements, like TV commercials. An offshore team with the requisite creative and technical talent that understands the brand can produce the banner ads with a high degree of accuracy. In addition, files from these off-site locations can be transmitted instantly to facilitate faster reviews and delivery.

An offshoring production strategy should be considered carefully to ensure a seamless transition and to avoid some of the pitfalls that can catch the unwary and unprepared.

First, all outsourcing should be done in a measured way and not as a quick-fix to solve an urgent resource issue. Reducing your production costs over the long-term through offshoring is only advisable if you are 100% certain that your strategic and creative delivery will not be compromised. While many production and some design activities can take place offshore, we recommend that the lead creative and concepting work remains with your in-house creative team.

Second, choose your offshore partner carefully. Agencies, like Flip Outsourcing, that offer both a strong onshore and offshore presence may be slightly more expensive than pure offshore players but agencies like ours offer the best of both worlds. Operating with a sales and project management team onshore means you have access to the agency in your time zone and with the facility for face to face meetings when necessary. An onshore team also gives you the confidence that cultural sensitivities and quality standards in your targeted geographies will be better understood.

Finally, involve the offshore team early and often, just as you would an in-house production department. In addition to the creative concept, we need to understand your client's marketing strategy and brand execution to be successful and to add the most value. You will be pleasantly surprised at how collaboratively and efficiently an onshore/offshore team can work together once the communication processes and relationships have been established.