In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Marta Stiglin, former in-house agency executive and founding member of the In-house Agency Forum, described key drivers behind the upswing in brands taking their marketing in-house. “Ten years ago, amid the recession, clients were…making cost efficiency a priority,” she said. Today, Stiglin added, there is less pressure to cut costs, and hiring a team internally that can do the work “fast and cheap” is irrelevant if it doesn’t perform in the market.
“You need measurement and analytics and insights to drive new programs and strategies,” she emphasized. “Knowledge of the brand and integrating at all points of contact, particularly with what’s going on with digital, is of paramount importance.”
At Filter, our experience shows that forward-thinking CMOs view their in-house agencies not simply as a cost-cutting tool, but as a strategic resource to accelerate their digital maturity and deliver business growth.
Several important and interrelated market forces are driving this view, including:
- The leading role customer experience plays today in determining a company’s success or failure
- The always-on demand for new, personalized, high-value content to continually elevate those experiences
- A surge in data available to marketers today to shape and personalize that content, along with the channel, campaign and product strategies through which customers experience it
- Recent martech innovations that enable marketers to put that data into action
- The rising accountability on CMOs to make sure this tech and data actually delivers stronger marketing performance and a better customer experience
Catherine Dutton, Head of UK&I Marketing for Atos, summed up these factors: “To achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, [CMOs] must deliver self-perpetuating cycles of real-time, two-way, insight-driven interactions with individual customers,”
A growing number of marketing leaders now see in-housing as a fundamental strategy for meeting this great challenge. As they see it, removing the barriers that separate the work of marketing and experience design from the data, insights, and ideas that fuel them enables them to act with greater impact, speed, and agility.
It also helps them to better connect the dots between spend and performance: direct access to data, control of resources, visibility into ongoing activities and trust in their own metrics allows marketing leaders to more accurately apportion credit to the myriad touchpoints in a modern marketing mix – and to more successfully identify the worth of specific marketing strategies, both as a whole and across channels independently.
It all adds up to greater command of the digital experience the brand delivers to customers – perhaps the most vital competitive advantage a marketer can have these days.
Wayne Barringer, Director of Creative Services for The Boeing Company, compared this advantage to the hidden superpower of his in-house agency: “We should emphasize our superpowers more – proximity inside the corporate walls, expertise of the brand, and institutional knowledge and efficiency of our teams. When it’s time to dial the 911-creative hotline, in-house teams are the Level One Trauma Centers of the creative universe.”
Read more about why forward-thinking marketers are moving their creative teams in-house in the new white paper, “The Hybrid Services Model.”
