The Planning of In-Housing

In seeking to get under the skin of the in-housing creative operations trend in the UK, we investigated how different brands, CMOs and creative directors have resolved some of the most common pain points and challenges of in-housing.

We interviewed senior stakeholders from major high-street retailers, a retail bank, a challenger protein-bar brand, a high-end property firm and a groundbreaking tech scale-up.

There was no single set model – everyone’s approach evolved over time. Some had clear goals from the beginning, some were just looking to de-risk and reduce operating costs. Some had big-picture goals of using creative thinking to make their organisations more innovative, one accidentally stumbled into an in-house creative model over time, and one even flat-out refuses to consider what they do as an in-house agency. 

However, patterns emerged – five distinctive approaches with overlap, which we’ve outlined below as useful blueprints.

Use case 1: Test and Learn 

Challenge: You don’t know which kind of agency model you want to build. You’re looking to lower running costs or simplify operations where you have inherited a legacy of various external agency relationships. 

Approaches: 

1. Work with external agencies, production houses and/or freelancers. If you

   identify specific capabilities you need on an ongoing basis, bring them in-house.

2. Rationalise creative to cut out duplication and unnecessary costs. Then look to optimise processes. Build out workflow processes and management systems and bring in talent as you grow.

   
   

3. Review progress quarterly, half-yearly or annually as appropriate to review what output is working best and what you can drop, what talent or skills you need to bring in, and what outsourced resource you may need. 

Results: 

Lower running costs. Less duplication and waste. Greater efficiency. More focused skillsets. Higher return on spend – or significant savings to show the business. You will likely need to continue working with external agencies for specific projects or specific periods, and your creatives may feel stretched.

“It just makes sense to control your brand because you understand it better than any agency, who just don’t have the time to get that same level of understanding that you do,” says Ivan Pols, Chief Creative Officer at what3words. 

Examples: 

Geocode tech startup what3words, whose CCO Ivan Pols says: “It wasn’t about building a specific type of in-house agency model. Rather, the approach was test and learn… I run a studio, and that sits inside a marketing team, and the CMO, marketing directors and I work together to ensure marketing helps to deliver on the objectives of the company… We bring in agencies because they’re specialists and they’re great at what they do. We want to learn from them.” 

A well-known London-based high-end property company, whose head of creative operations says: “We’ve got to the point where we manage most creative internally and work externally with a few preferred agencies for specific campaigns. We didn’t set out to become an in-house agency; it just naturally evolved over the last five to six years.”

Use case 2: Flex and Scale 

Challenge: You’re growing rapidly and unsure how much marketing resource you will need and when. You don’t want to overcommit financially by hiring too much expensive talent too early. You need flexibility as you seek product-market fit.

Approaches: 

1. Hire a core team of marketing executives who will build an ecosystem of external agencies and marketing service providers to use on an ad hoc basis as needed.

   
   

2. Train up existing employees to take over creative roles, using external industry-accredited resources.

Results: 

Low running costs. Risk of low growth without someone at the helm who really understands the commercial potential of good creative. Need to adopt a flexible startup mentality throughout the organisation, which allows for flexible budgeting when needed. Focus on product-market fit becomes super important. Need to really understand the DNA of the brand and its core market/advocates.

Examples: 

Protein-bar brand Grenade, whose former Managing Director Kyle Rowe says: “The flexibility of that hybrid model increases your chances of success because it allows you to scale and only increase your costs when you really need to. You can bring core creative operations in-house, but you can’t in-house everything you might need, because there will be specific skills it just doesn’t make sense for you to pay for all the time.” 

Use case 3: Strategic Alignment 

Challenge:

You need to prove the value of creative to a business that is driven by sales or by tech developers who don’t really understand – or tend to undervalue – marketing. This often leads to creative burnout, insufficient budget allocation, disappointing results and lots of finger-pointing.

Approaches: 

1. Creatives must learn the specific language and terminology of the business. This will help them to interpret requests for creative when these aren’t framed in creative terms.

   
   

2. Creatives must learn the key strategic and operational challenges of the business, and learn to converse fluently with the C-suite using jargon they understand.

   
   

3. Creatives must be open to criticism and feedback from across the business, and transparent in how they work. This helps to build trust.

   
   

4. Keep creatives physically close to the rest of the business. 

Results: 

Greater levels of mutual trust and respect. An increase in more creative problem-solving across the business. More innovative mindset. Better expectation management. Stronger business cases for campaigns, usually followed by more generous budget allocations.

Examples: 

High street bank TSB, whose Brand & Marketing Leader Keith Gulliver says: “When we first started out with internal creative ops, I think it was a bit scary for some in the business because they’d never had that technical capability before. Now they see the benefit of it. Often, the creatives at Kindred are pulled into other meetings when people feel the need for creative thinking on other business problems. So, there’s an element of creative thinking that we hadn’t even anticipated when we started.” 

Boots CMO Pete Markey says: “In-housing brings the creative craft closer and makes it less mysterious. I think when you when you’ve got people sat alongside you doing the work, it makes it way more accessible.” 

Use case 4: the Magpie Agency 

Challenge: 

You want to set up an internal agency, but you lack the skills or experience to do it without help. You also lack confidence in your ability to hire top creative talent or to manage it effectively. You’re also not entirely sure how to manage the process of pitching to agencies.

Approaches: 

1. You bring in an agency to run your in-house operations for you. They control everything, from ideation to execution for social, content, and big campaigns and media spend.

   
   

2. You bring in an agency to set up and run core in-house operations for you and coordinate your agency ecosystem of internal and external organisations.

   
   

3. You bring in an agency to set up and run part of your in-house operations – most commonly content, and organic and paid social media – but you or your external agencies ideate the big ideas and campaign plans, and this agency executes some aspects for you. 

Results: 

Immediate impact and creative knowledge and experience in the business. This can get expensive, but is a good way to go if speed is most important, or you have specific pressure to create campaign ideas. Also good for managing creatives, since you don’t need to worry about sourcing, onboarding or rotating talent, if that makes you feel uncomfortable.

Examples: 

High-street retailer and pharmacy Boots, whose creative ecosystem consists of external WPP agency Hogarth for the big ideas and campaign management, fully internal content agency The B-Hive for most digital and printed media, and externally managed in-house agency Oliver – which, says CMO Pete Markey, “does some of our brand identity work and our in-store creative.” 

Pete is a big fan of this external in-house agency model, stating: “I’d argue the work got better and more consistent and we have a more engaged team, while the costs went down… They could attract talent with their eyes closed, because they have a big network, they’ve got a big name.” 

Use case 5: Wrap and Replace 

Challenge: 

You want the benefits of the external in-house agency model, but without the ongoing costs, which can balloon over time. You want all the benefits of the external in-house agency model, but you want to bring the knowledge and the intellectual property in-house.

Approaches: 

1. Bring in an experienced creative from the agency world to set up and build a creative studio for you from scratch. To do this quickly will take a large budget; to do it more cost-effectively will take time.

   
   

2. Work with an experienced agency to set up and run your internal creative operations for you, then learn from them and take over operations, transferring the knowledge and talent internally. Or work with an agency that sets this up for you, sources, onboards and trains the key talent, then hands the reins over to you once the internal operations are running successfully. 

Results: 

Rapid injection of creative experience, talent and mindset. No need to worry about sourcing, selecting or retaining top creative talent when you have an agency to do it for you with their own extensive creative networks and reputation.

Examples: 

High-street bank TSB, whose Brand & Marketing Leader Keith Gulliver says: “Not having built an internal agency before, we opted for an off-the-shelf solution from Oliver. We hothoused that, meaning we kept the creatives apart from the marketing team and set them up in a WeWork. And we stayed with Oliver for a couple of years, slowly scaling and slowly growing, slowly learning, seeing what was and wasn’t working. 

“I always had the ambition that it would transition to being fully internal, because although that fully managed internal solution initially saved us money, as we scaled it became less efficient and not far off the cost of a fully external agency. In the end, you have to ask what you’re paying for, and effectively what they were doing came down to sourcing and managing creative talent. We thought: we do that better and more efficiently ourselves. 

“We started by moving to a hybrid model, still with Oliver but with a leadership team around it that reported directly to us. One of those leaders was Trevor Chambers, who I’d worked with at the start of my career. I knew he had the skills to lead and scale an internal agency.

“Once Trevor came onboard, we leveraged his connections, starting to scale down the Oliver resource and scale up our investment into directly employed capabilities, to the point where we then terminated the contract with Oliver. At that point we had around 12 people internally doing what Oliver had done. Today we have around 22 people, and we’re about to bring in several more.” 

How far are YOU in your in-housing journey? 

Talk to Chris Ward – email cward@therivergroup.co.uk or call 07973 548766.