I started my working career as a special effects film editor in the 80s ad world where quality was an absolute obsession. Even into the past decade many major ad agencies refused to contemplate delivery to any medium apart from cinemas or TV because they feared that their ‘artwork’ would be of inferior quality on these platforms.
Fast forward to today and I’ve just taken delivery of some ads which show how little agencies now care about quality. The encoding is, well, the only word I can use is sh*t, as have been all the encoded files I’ve ever seen supplied by agencies.
If they supplied masters, as ad agencies used to do to broadcasters, the videos could be encoded at a high quality for the medium on which they’re delivered (for example, we had to transcode these ads to Windows Media for delivery to one of the world’s largest portals).
A huge amount of money is spent producing these ads, surely as much care should be devoted to delivering them ?