• by Teresa Herd , July 1, 2024

Five years ago, I was asked at a panel in Cannes: Will the in-house trend continue to grow, or die? I said if it’s done right, it will grow. If not, the pendulum will swing back.

And it looks like the pendulum is swinging back.

While in-house work is comparative to external agency work for quality and speed, it’s never set up with the same amount of strategy, capacity and infrastructure to support the work and team. This results in miscommunication, misaligned skill sets and additional work for teams that are already stretched thin.

The main issues I see fall into three categories:

When going “straight to the creatives” isn’t faster. Internal agency creatives are often asked to be strategists, account folks, PMs and proofreaders. This takes time and energy away from the thing they are good at. The work suffers.

When in-house teams can’t move fast enough. Internal teams, unlike agencies, are usually stretched so thin that there is very little capacity to move folks around. In order to “do something ASAP,” even if it seems simple, work has to be reshuffled. Who suffers? The marketing team who planned well and got their request in on time.

When your in-house agency’s needs overload marketers. Turns out, running your own agency is hard. Marketers are required to learn and use workflow tools, write multiple kinds of briefs, build campaign plans, create workback schedules, and so on. It makes marketers wish for the days when they paid their agency to do those things.

The answer is not to go back to external agencies only, but to set up your internal agency for success. Here are five steps to get there.

1. Figure out what makes sense for the internal team. This should be based on the ROI of the team and the business need. If you need a studio production team, hire for that — but don’t act as if that same team could make a Super Bowl ad for you.

2. Give your team quality briefs. A great marketing brief is not the same thing as the insightful, succinct creative briefs that agencies give their teams. If you expect quality output, don’t deny your internal team the same quality of input.

3. Build in flex. There usually is no “extra money” for internal teams to hire freelancers when a job comes in that was not planned, or if a business demands a new asset ASAP. A freelance budget should be built into the in-house budget so the team can flex during busy times.

4. Recognize that not all projects are created equal. When demands outnumber capacity, weigh the creative complexity AND the true business priority for each new ask. It's often relegated to the creative team to figure out what’s most important. Nobody wants that to happen!

5. Look ahead. Between the demand for personalization and the advent of generative AI, a tidal wave is coming. Make sure your martech stack is in great order and your team is agile enough to move with the tide.

I am not pro in-house. I’m pro brand. If you want to capture the savings of an in-house team, you have to make the right investments first.