• by Bill Duggan , Yesterday

In advance of the upcoming Association of National Advertisers' In-House Agency Conference, I spoke with Melanie Huet, CMO of Newell Brands. Newell’s product portfolio includes Rubbermaid, Coleman, Elmer’s, Sharpie, Yankee Candle, and more. Melanie shared her views on issues including in-housing, AI, and the industry overall. 

Bill Duggan: Tell us about your in-house agency. When was it established, how many people work there, and what are examples of typical projects?

Melanie Huet: At Newell Brands, we’ve been on a journey transforming our in-house agency into a strategic growth engine. Since early 2024, the team of approximately 100 professionals has sharpened their focus on moving with speed and agility, thinking boldly, executing operational excellence and achieving cost efficiencies. From digital campaigns and influencer marketing to retailer media and packaging, the team aims to produce commercial innovation and marketing that fuels brand business performance.

One of the projects we’ve been working on over the past year is streamlining our operations to meet rising content demands and deliver more with less. For example, we’re rebuilding our internal content supply chain to improve both quality and effectiveness, and we’re leveraging AI to do it. This move is part of a broader strategy to build capabilities that drive growth, including modernizing brand communications and elevating media performance. The team is partnering with Adobe Firefly to rebuild our internal content supply chain and upgrade our marketing technology stack to deliver 5X content without increasing internal headcount. 

Ultimately, our in-house agency is a core capability that enables our brands to achieve marketing and commercial innovation excellence and bring our corporate strategy to life.

Duggan: How do you decide what work gets done internally versus what gets done by an outside agency?

Huet: It comes down to impact, efficiency, and where we can create the most value. Our in-house team is built to move fast and scale brand communications and media effectively, especially for work that requires deep brand familiarity and cross-functional collaboration with other internal teams, such as social content, influencer campaigns and driving the overall public relations strategy. 

We hire creative agencies for creative strategy work and unlocking the big idea. Internally, we are content machines able to take a creative strategy, extrapolate it across multiple mediums, and build out a thorough execution of the idea globally. Our internal team handles most of our eCommerce content, packaging design work and a good portion of content creation. 

For media, we partner with external experts for broader media strategy, buying, and optimization. When I joined, Newell didn’t have a unified media approach. Hence, we did a global agency review and selected CrossMedia and CommerceIQ to bring all channels under one media agency and one platform. That consolidation gives us a single source of truth and the ability to maximize return on media investment.

We’re also leaning into AI both in-house and through partners, to ensure we’re future-ready. Our approach is to play to the strengths of both internal and external teams. The in-house agency delivers speed, agility, and deep brand alignment, while our external partners bring scale, technical depth, and innovation in areas like media and mar-tech.

Duggan: In-housing usually starts with creative projects, and media is sometimes added later. What are the media capabilities of your in-house team? And do you see that increasing over time?

Huet: As Newell continues its evolution, our in-house media team is transforming from a supportive role in brand management to a strategic partner, offering advanced media expertise, ensuring data accuracy, and delivering cutting-edge, data-driven solutions that drive growth and innovation.

After extensive benchmarking, we shifted to a modern media model internally organized into three groups: National Media & Data, Retailer Media and Influencer & Engagement. We have strength and experience in retailer media, with a bullseye on Amazon. We believe being data-driven is essential for modern-day marketing. Therefore, we compiled our media data into one data lake for easier data mining. We are investing in our technology stack to strengthen our ability to determine the ROI of our actions and continually optimize our investments. 

Over time, I absolutely see our internal media muscle growing. One of my top priorities is to build a media capability that drives incremental revenue, and that means equipping our in-house team with the talent, tools, and data to lead strategic planning. 

This transformation is just starting, and I see even more opportunity ahead as we continue to elevate our media sophistication and business impact.

Duggan: You have been a vocal advocate for AI. How is Newell, and your in-house agency specifically, using AI for marketing? 

Huet: At Newell, we see AI as a transformational tool helping us unlock speed, scale, and smarter decision-making across our organization and in-house agency. 

The insights team focused on delivering the quickest speed to insight. We’ve accomplished this by launching an AI-backed Insights hub named iHub and investing in digital personas. iHub unlocked global insights sharing. Thousands of users enjoy instant access to all syndicated and custom research. We complemented this by creating 20 AI-powered synthetic consumer personas built on deep category knowledge. These personas can engage in natural language conversations to help our teams with everything from creative inspiration and packaging studies to claim development and strategic planning. What used to take weeks of traditional research and tens of thousands of dollars can now be done in hours, and in many cases, with no external spend. We grew the incremental value of our innovation pipeline by three times.

We’ve tested this approach against conventional research methods, and the results are remarkably strong. The fidelity of insights is high, and AI has allowed us to expand our research capability to smaller brands that previously didn’t have the budget for robust testing.

We’re also applying AI to accelerate our content pipeline, using tools like Adobe Firefly to generate assets and reduce production time. We’re piloting use cases across media planning, copywriting, and shelf set generation.

Internally, we’re focused on up-skilling our teams so AI isn’t siloed -- it’s embedded in everyday workflows. For us, AI isn’t about replacing human creativity or intuition. It’s about enhancing our ability to think bigger, move faster, and bring more value to the business.

Duggan: How do you personally use ChatGPT?

Huet: I test myself and ChatGPT daily to see what we can accomplish together!  I use it for analytics, research, strategy, business questions, speech writing, travel planning and all the obvious things. Lately, I’ve tried some new spaces like asking for advice on how to raise a teenage daughter. So far, ChatGPT continues to impress.

Duggan: Let’s move beyond in-housing. What most excites you about today’s ad industry? 

Huet: AI. The advent of agentic AI is thrilling. Our CEO, Chris Peterson, is pushing us to the limit on AI to ensure we stay at the forefront of what is possible utilizing AI.