Many of my fellow agency folk talk about communication problems between production and media. For the most part, these difficulties have striking similarities from one agency to another. Moreover, most of them can be prevented with a little formalized communication between the two departments. The little spats between media and production occur for very real reasons. Neither Media nor Production wants the responsibility for tracking down the latest ad specs.
Production requires additional time past the material close dates to produce ads.
Let's take them one at a time Media planners should always have a baseline idea of what it costs to produce additional creative, how long it takes and how much a client has in his production budget. There's no point in recommending PointCast to a client if you know they don't have enough money in the production budget to cover the cost of the commercial. Many agencies can build in fees for covering resizings of ad executions into the IAB standard sizes, but it's also important for a media planner to realize that a creative concept that will work within a 468x60 space does not necessarily work in an 88x31 microbutton. If an agency fee can simply be worked in to the production budget for handling resizings, then all the media people have to do is watch out for anything offered in a media package that's not standard size. If a package has non-standard ad units as a component, perhaps the media property offering it can throw in the cost of resizing an existing creative concept to fit the space.