In the newly-published edition of its annual Marketing Imperatives report, Merkle identifies strategic sourcing – the “thoughtful reconsideration of your current marketing operations to realign your people, skills, and processes,” – as a key requirement for marketing organizations to achieve greater agility, productivity, innovation, and cost-efficiency in the decade ahead.
One key takeaway: 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.
As Merkle emphasizes in its report, “this [hybrid] approach is increasingly favored by companies to maximize the speed and depth of brand, business, and culture assimilation and significantly streamlines communications and coordination.” It also helps marketing leaders boost agility and scalability, take greater command of the customer experience, and bring more transparency and accountability to their marketing organizations.
A New Imperative
Each year, Merkle – one of the world’s largest digital agencies (and Filter’s parent company) – publishes a new edition of the Marketing Imperatives to provide key insights, strategic frameworks, and tactical guidelines for customer-focused marketing leaders. The 2020 Report explores how brand success will ultimately hinge upon achieving the next level of addressable, personalized marketing; it details not only the strategies and technology behind this evolution but also the organizational agility required to enable it.
As the 2020 report notes, “today’s marketer who delivers the customer experience across marketing, sales, and service needs a vast array of capabilities and competencies to deliver on that customer experience. It’s imperative that they determine their optimal mix or supply chain of resources to support those goals.”
Merkle underlines that “this is not an either/or decision between bringing everything in-house or relying exclusively on external partners…Consider a hybrid approach where external teams are collocated with internal resources.”
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Marketing Imperatives E-Book
Providing an Inside Advantage…
In-housing partners like Filter are uniquely built for this hybrid approach – and are a breed apart from staff augmentation firms, on-site agency teams, consultancies, or other “collocated” solutions.
In-housing partners enable companies to reap the many benefits of an in-house agency – but without the myriad organizational hurdles, business risks, and other roadblocks that hobble many brands who try to go about it the traditional way. Rather than recruit, hire, manage, and retain their own FTEs to staff internal teams, forward-thinking marketing leaders leverage the operational strength, organizational insights, and specialized expertise of in-housing partners to quickly deploy in-house solutions that flex and scale with their needs.
“… why brands have taken work in-house: distrust, fear of overpaying, desire for greater control and concerns that agencies aren’t fast or connected to the brand enough.”
– Mark Duval, The Duval Partnership, Adweek 12/28/18
…and Playing Well with Others
Moreover, in-housing partners (the good ones, anyway) bring proven processes and decades of experience to help clients shape their broader, holistic sourcing strategy. They provide proven frameworks to orchestrate marketing work and budgets across FTEs, in-housing partners, external agencies, and offshore resources. In-housing partners play well with others and easily collaborate with these internal and external parties to continuously optimize their client’s marketing operations.
“Treating work as a collaborative effort with a division of responsibilities among marketers, in-house agencies, and external agencies ensures productive relationships aimed at improving the work.”
– Forrester Research, “Unleash The Potential Of In-House Agencies,” November 2018
For many CMOs, leveraging in-housing partners in a “hybrid approach” sourcing strategy provides a best-of-both-worlds solution. This kind of work is important – and not always easy. “Because it’s a complicated process and there’s no quick fix,” notes Merkle’s 2020 report, “not every company will take on this challenge. But the few who invest in the effort to optimize their marketing organization will also be building an advantage that will be difficult to replicate.”
In perhaps the most notable example, Procter & Gamble saved nearly $1 billion over the past four years1 by shifting to a hybrid mix of in-house and external services. By reinvesting those savings into marketing, P&G also saw a considerable boost in sales. Other top brands who have recently taken similar steps – Prudential Financial, Target, Toyota, Lexus, Walmart, and many more – are also signaling the financial rewards of a hybrid approach.
A Breed Apart
The unique value of in-housing partners is largely a result of their unique position within a client’s organization: tightly integrated with their own people and processes, often for ongoing, indeterminant engagements. Again, that position is distinctly different from staffing firms or other “collocated” solutions. Upcoming blog posts will take a closer look at how this inside advantage brings additional benefits to marketing and experience design organizations.
1. Business Insider, April 2019
