Part One of this series discussed how IHPs – in-housing partners, outside firms who build and manage embedded teams and bespoke in-house solutions for clients – offer CMOs a vital new “hybrid” alternative to the traditional agency-or-internal-staff option when crafting their own sourcing strategy. Part Two explored how the unique “embedded” position of IHPs empowers them to deliver greater sustained impact and value for clients through optimization and continuous improvement of their marketing and XD operations.
This post takes a look at three other drivers of growth and success – transparency, command of the customer experience, and brand alignment – and how in-housing partners enable their attainment in ways that on-site consultants, agency teams, and other collocated solutions can’t match.
“Brands are taking work in-house out of distrust, fear of overpaying, desire for greater control, and concerns that agencies are too slow and don’t “get” their brand enough.”
– Mark Duval Adweek, Dec 2018
Transparency & Control
Seventy percent of CEOs expect their CMOs to take the leading role in driving business growth.1 But while marketing leaders are held increasingly accountable for the business impact of their efforts, they also know how difficult it can be to precisely track spend, effort, and the return on those investments. And it’s considerably more difficult when layers of agency partners are involved.
Adding to these difficulties are transparency concerns throughout the industry. A 2016 ANA report2 found that numerous non-transparent business practices, including cash rebates to media agencies, were pervasive in the U.S. media ad-buying ecosystem. Similarly, a 2017 ANA report3 concluded that transparency concerns in production exist at multiple agencies and holding companies.
In response, marketers have acted by taking work in-house. For them, the shift is about improving transparency and control by removing uncertainty, barriers, and illusion. As the ANA discovered in its 2018 industry survey, “advertisers are now turning to in-house agencies for benefits related to transparency and data.”4 That same ANA report recommends that advertisers have a management strategy that affords them control and oversight of their data.
By their nature, in-housing partners improve transparency where other solutions may diminish it. Even when external agency or consultancy teams work on-site, their approach and operations stand apart from the client’s organization. IHPs, on the other hand, are tightly integrated with the client’s own people and processes, often for ongoing, indeterminant engagements.
In this way, working with an in-housing partner to bring marketing work inside naturally enables greater transparency, increasing the CMO’s grasp of ROMI by providing better visibility into the practices, priorities and decision-making behind those investments. It increases a company’s ability to choose when and where to inject money into a campaign, or to cut spending from an inefficient channel or tactic. And It helps them to better connect the dots between spend and performance – to more accurately apportion credit to the myriad touchpoints across an omnichannel strategy, and more successfully identify the worth of specific channels, programs or tactics.
Command of the Customer Experience
In the Age of the Customer, CMOs and CXOs increasingly view ownership and control of their brands’ digital experience as a strategic imperative. As Forrester’s Jay Pattisall notes, “owning customer relationships and marketing decisions is paramount for organizations today. What was once a database function is now the customer’s primary experience with the brand.”5
But many CMOs and CXOs have learned how difficult it is to meet evolving consumer expectations when multiple layers of agencies and other vendors stand between them and their customers. Throwing the work over the wall to an outside UX firm, or working through the various layers of a traditional agency model, diffuses their ability to drive high-quality content – personalized to each customer and their stage in the experience journey – at speed and scale.
As a result, marketing leaders are transforming their approaches and operating models in order to give themselves greater control. They’re more actively wrapping their hands and heads around customer data and insights to forge a first-hand understanding of their wants and needs – and working to close the gap between those insights and the personalized experiences they enable.
Once again, in-housing partners are uniquely positioned to support these efforts. Embedded in ongoing engagements, integrated with the client’s own practices and processes, their teams sit at the front lines of the connected, omnichannel customer experience. Armed with best practices, specialized expertise, and executional horsepower, they leverage that position to give CMOs and CXOs greater command than ever before.
Depth of Brand
Similarly, this ‘inside advantage’ gives IHPs a leg up at helping clients maintain brand consistency and cohesion – especially in a dynamic, siloed or unpredictable business landscape.
As digital transformations accelerate, as strategies shift, and as experience touchpoints multiply, brand leaders need to act with greater agility and collaboration across the enterprise. While outside agencies can add extra time and layers to work through, reports show that in-housing partners are “increasingly favored by companies to maximize the speed and depth of brand, business, and culture assimilation and significantly streamline communications and coordination.”6
“Over time, our marketers have steadily outsourced our work. This has resulted in too many touchpoints between brand managers and consumers, and a lot of project management versus brand management. We need our people closer to the consumers they serve. And we need fewer project managers and more brand entrepreneurs.”
– Mark Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, Proctor & Gamble7
In a Wall Street Journal article last year, Marta Stiglin, former in-house agency executive and founding member of the In-house Agency Forum, described key drivers behind the upswing in brands moving brand work closer inside the organization. “Ten years ago, amid the recession, clients were…making cost efficiency a priority,” she said. Today, Stiglin emphasized, “knowledge of the brand and integrating at all points of contact, particularly with what’s going on with digital, is of paramount importance.”8
Indeed, more than one-quarter of respondents in a 2018 Forrester and In-house Agency Forum study said that the greatest advantage of having an internal agency was “knowledge of the brand,” and 20 percent said “knowledge of the business.”9
A Breed Apart
As noted in an earlier post in this series, in-housing partners may at first seem only slightly different than staff augmentation firms, workforce solutions, on-site agency teams or other collocated options. But the unique position and prowess of an IHP greatly magnify its impact.
Embedded and integrated with a client’s own people and processes, culture, and business organization, IHPs are situated at the front lines of a client’s customer experience initiatives. From this vantage they are ideally positioned to enable CMOs and CXOs to gain greater command of that experience – and to ensure strong brand alignment across the full spectrum of omnichannel activation. Better transparency, more accurate attribution, and smarter budget allocation are also natural benefits of their inside approach.
These are the advantages experience and marketing leaders are looking for – and why they are leveraging in-housing partners in an exciting new “hybrid approach” to their resourcing strategy.
1. The CMO Shift to Gaining Business Lift, CMO Council Survey
2. “An Independent Study of Media Transparency in the U.S. Advertising Industry,” K2 Intelligence, June 2016
3. “Production Transparency in the U.S. Advertising Industry,” ANA, August 2017
4. “The Continued Rise of the In-House Agency,” ANA, October 2018
5. “Make Your In-House Agency Your Digital Agency,” Forrester, May 2018
6. 2020 Marketing Imperatives, Merkle, January 2020
7. “P&G Brand Chief Vows to ‘Take Back Control’ from Agencies,” Financial Times, March 2018
8. “In-house Agencies on Rise as Advertisers Seek Services Closer to Home,” WSJ, August 2018
9. ibid
