• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, 10 hours ago

In my 12, almost 13 years of writing for MediaPost, I have written countless columns about how agencies abuse manage media planning and operations to make money for themselves. You have heard about principal media, dark pools of programmatic, costly middlemen services and more. These are all being used today. All are highly beneficial to agencies, while the benefit to advertisers is, at best, questionable.

But media isn’t the only source of obscure income for agencies. The U.K. advertising and marketing trade magazine Campaign recently published its findings on leaked internal guidance at WPP Production (in the U.K.). Staff are being instructed to convince clients to direct-assign production work valued under €500,000 straight to the holding company, because, you know… money. When clients or creative teams push for a typical three-way cost comparison, the guidance suggests: Generate all three bids internally from different regional markets or director rosters within the WPP Production universe.

Historically, commercial triple bidding was marketing procurement's primary mechanism to ensure price transparency and cost control. At the same time, agency producers had invented creative ways to get around this. They routinely organized "cover bids": inflated estimates solicited from friendly third-party production houses to create pricing benchmarks that made their preferred director look like the most cost-effective choice. The directors or production houses went along with this because… you know… again… money.

Back then, many brand marketers lacked production experience, and marketing procurement specialists did not exist yet, so these quotes passed through governance filters unchecked. But what WPP Production now has done is to formalize, scale, and institutionalize that behavior. By offering "three internal bids" under one umbrella, the holding company creates the illusion of market competition while keeping 100% of the client's budget inside its own ecosystem.

But today we have marketing procurement on the case, right? They would catch these practices, wouldn’t they?

Well, the reality is, no, very often they don’t. Agencies frame international branches as genuine price competition. They tell procurement, "We are pitting our U.K. director against our South African unit to give you a low-cost offshore shoot option." What procurement fails to realize is that transfer pricing across sub-entities allows the parent company to shift profit margins internally. The holding company ensures that their margin is protected regardless of which "country" wins.

When the agency offers an internal triple bid, they often promise lower overall line-item costs, zero agency markup fees, or bundled post-production. Procurement logs this as a cost-saving win on their spreadsheet. They don't look closely at the underlying margin or whether the global branches are pitching against each other because the financial optics satisfy their immediate corporate KPI.

Agencies are meant to act as fiduciaries and independent advisors to their clients. This approach to bid rigging is not that. If marketers want to protect their production budgets and creative quality, they need operational governance:

Explicitly ban internal triple bids in your contracts: Define a competitive triple bid as requiring three independent, unaffiliated third-party production entities.

Enforce strict opt-in rules for in-house arms:If you choose to consider an agency’s in-house production arm, treat them as a single bidder against two independent external firms.

So yeah, pay attention to those production bids. Because, you know… money!