In-Housing & The New Agency/Brand Relationship

Last week, the BIMA Brand Council met online to explore in-housing, the opportunities it presents, the advantages of working with agencies and what’s next. Here are the key takeaways.

Why in-house?
There are still big opportunities and benefits for organisations that use in-housing. They include:

• Quantity: In-housing is great for managing a sheer quantity of work – when you’retaking content and repurposing it can be a very efficient, cost-effective way of operating
• Productivity: You’re working with people who know your business, who understand your property and who think in your language.
• Control: Whether it’s your data or your tone of voice, there’s an element of being better able to manage multiple departments when everything’s all under one roof
• Internal politics and navigation: You know the right people to gain buy-in, to support implementation or to use as influencers.

Those advantages seemed even more compelling when placed alongside some of the negative aspects of working with agencies, which included:

• Value for money: The agency fee and model doesn’t necessarily work for all projects. It can work out overly expensive
• Consistency: Because agencies often rely on freelancers you often don’t get the same people
• Efficiency: An agency cannot adapt as quickly to your needs as your own workforce. You’re also quite often having to re-educate people as the team changes
• Motivation: It can be hard to keep your agency team focussed and motivated to follow through on one aspect of a project before they move on to the next. As one contributor put it: “Agencies get bored because their margins depend on it.”

The advantages of agencies
But the discussion did acknowledge that there are many ways where agency input is invaluable:

• Innovation: Agencies have the most creative and innovative talent. They’re skilled and trained in these processes
• Perspective: The strategy and planning insight from an agency is often superior to that available in-house
• Culture: Agencies are adept at leaning into the zeitgeist and cultural moments
• Best of the best: A brief might go out to multiple teams across multiple offices and go through rigorous thought before it even gets to you
• Expertise: You may need a third party to convince others within the business that you should be investing in tech. Agencies can provide the expertise, accountability and credibility. That’s reassuring when you’re making big investments

The pitfalls of in-housing
The group explored the biggest learning points they or their organisations had experienced when bringing creative or media capabilities in-house. The responses indicated that, whilst in-housing may have many benefits, without the right organisational approach it can be difficult to fully realise them.

Learning points included:

• Organisations may lack the expertise to hire well – “if you don’t know how to find the skills you need then you won’t get very far”
• A tendency to underestimate everything
• An inability to know what ‘good’ looks like
• The need to bring your IT and HR colleagues with you

The in-house/agency tension and what comes next
We’re all familiar with the core issues: no one knows your brand better than those who work within it, yet an agency brings expertise, innovation and creativity you may never be able to replicate in-house. The nirvana, it seems, is to have the right quality of people to be efficient and productive in order to keep the work going but still have the agency support to provoke you and create landmark pieces.

But the current system does have its flaws and there’s nothing like a global pandemic to highlight them. What really energised the discussion was exploring what will change over the coming months.

As the above pitfalls demonstrate, organisations really need a framework for best practice in in-housing. And now’s the time because there’s a surplus of great talent in the market. We’re also seeing marketers pivot and supporting them will involve making changes to the traditional agency model. We’ll need different ways of working – ways that are more skills- based and are leaner and agile. And as more work is brought in-house, one way of reshaping the relationship (and agencies’ commercial models) is for agencies to support in- house activities as coaches and educators.

BIMA’s Brand Council will be meeting next month to continue the discussion – email hollyhall@bima.co.uk if you want to be part if it.