The Picture Lock

In 2009 I was Brand Director at Orange UK, and the last triple bid I ever sat over as a client arrived on my desk already decided.

Fallon was our creative agency. Their producer had taken the script to three production companies, and three treatments had come back. I never saw the bids. My head of advertising did, with the agency producer's recommendation clipped to the front. What reached me was a name, a reel and a treatment: this director, this world, this reason he understood the idea well enough to be trusted with it.

Price mattered but price was never the decision. You could always negotiate the number of shoot days, the location, studio against exterior. What you could not negotiate was what the director caught in the camera and shaped in the edit suite, because in 2009 that was the ad. Thirty seconds for television, longer for cinema, a couple of cutdowns. Once it was shot, your ability to change it was close to zero.

That is the world the triple bid was built for. It has been gone for years. Last week the industry started arguing about it again, and everyone is arguing about the wrong thing.

Campaign reported extracts from an internal WPP Production guidance document. The reported goal is to move clients away from conventional triple bidding and establish WPP Production as their "default, trusted partner". Where a client insists on three bids, staff are asked to consider whether all three can be supplied from inside the group with different approaches, locations and director treatments, with the work never leaving WPP Production. The trade bodies responded within hours. Steve Davies of the APA called it "a serious threat to the free market in commercials production". Matt Miller at AICP called it anti-competitive and self-serving. WPP rejected outright the suggestion that it misleads clients.

Every word of that argument is about conduct. Whether WPP is being sneaky. Whether the independents are being protectionist. Whether clients are being told. All red herrings.

I want to argue about something else. In February, in Production Has Five Moats, I wrote this: "Master content is still briefed by creative teams working with strategy as it should be. But everything that follows such as adaptations, personalised variants, atomised assets for different audiences and channels is briefed by data. Specifically, by the same identity and media data that drives programmatic decisions. This means production needs to be closer to media and data infrastructure. Further from creatives and their ideas."

Seven months later a leaked document has the whole industry defending or attacking a bidding ritual, and nobody has asked what the ritual is bidding for.

The document is unremarkable. Every holding company, always, has wanted to keep revenue inside the house, and every one of them has told its people so. I spent thirteen years at Publicis Groupe, seven on the Management Committee, and I have sat in rooms where this ambition was simply the weather. Fallon, incidentally, was a Publicis agency in 2009 and the reason nobody suggested taking that production in-house was not ethics. It was that there was nothing to take it in-house to. The capability that creates the conflict everyone is now debating barely existed. Three holding companies now have branded production platforms. The conduct is a consequence of the structure, and the structure was a choice.

WPP's error was putting it in writing in a form that reads badly when extracted.

The document is not public. The extracts were selected by a source nobody has named, no outlet has said it saw the whole thing, and WPP's complaint that a comprehensive document has been selectively quoted is procedurally fair and, so far, entirely untested.

The triple bid was never about price. It was about irreversibility.

In 2009 you had one shot, in the most literal sense. The judgement that mattered was applied before the point of no return. So three treatments, compared by a producer who knew what they were looking at, on the last day anyone could still choose, were reasonable.

Now look at what production has become.

The brief still exists. Today it briefs something of a library: master content, plus atomised components made for the client and held in a system. What the consumer eventually sees is assembled from that library at the moment of serving, finished by generative systems, against a signal that tells the system who is watching.

We used to make advertising-shaped things to fit media-shaped holes. There are no holes of a fixed shape left. There are millions of them, each a different shape, each open for the length of an auction.

So what, exactly, are three companies supposed to be pricing?

The triple bid isn't obsolete. Its territory has collapsed. It remains exactly the right instrument for the master (the hero film, the director, the craft, the place where irreversibility still lives and a treatment still decides). It is meaningless for the four thousand variants downstream, where nothing is irreversible and no director is involved. One rule is being applied to two entirely different things, and neither side of last week's argument distinguished them.

And the judgement didn't disappear. Irreversibility didn't vanish; it became automated and instantaneous. Nobody applies judgement at the speed of an ad call. So the judgement the triple bid used to buy has moved upstream, into the system: the library, the assembly rules, the model that decides what gets finished for whom. That is the thing a buyer should now be evaluating. It is also the thing no triple bid can price.

Here's why procurement keeps asking for three.

Procurement management is built to price specified inputs. Resin. Kilowatt hours. Handset contracts. Rate cards. It works, and it works because the specification is stable. Marketing services is a category where the specification dissolved and nobody on the sell side had any reason to say so, because the bidding ritual was one they could still win. This isn't a competence failure in procurement. It's a system built for finished articles being handed a supply chain, and doing exactly what it was designed to do.

James Brook Partridge, who runs WPP Productions UK, gave the fullest defence anyone at WPP has offered, in shots. Clients need roughly three times the content they needed three years ago, he says, and potentially five to twenty times more within two years, at greater speed, without materially bigger budgets.

Take those numbers at face value. Every one of them is an argument for less discrete production, not more. If the ecosystem is heading for five times today's volume at flat cost, the last thing anyone should be fighting over is who gets to bid on the film. And yet the document, as reported, is a plan to win the ritual: supply all three, or bid first, or decline and go direct. The energy is going into capturing a procurement behaviour from 2009.

The better strategy was available and is harder. Say in public what the document implies in private: that triple bidding belongs to the master, not to the ecosystem, and that clients are still applying the wrong rule to the wrong thing. Teach the buyer. Raise the capability of the procurement function rather than route around it. That takes longer, earns less this quarter, and is the only version that cannot be read as deception.

In 2009 I knew exactly what I was buying: a finished article, caught once, to fit a hole of known shape. What I was really buying was judgement before the point of no return. That point has moved to a place no treatment can reach, and the judgement has to move with it.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 14 September 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.