The report draws on Filter’s 30-year background in resourcing solutions for digital marketing, user experience and emerging technology services, distilling this vast experience into data-driven insights and actionable recommendations for CMOs and other business leaders.
Top takeaways include an analysis of how in-housing brings greater command and control of a company’s digital experience and the returns it can deliver in meeting the always-on demand for new, personalized, high-value content to continually elevate those experiences.
The report also details the myriad organizational and resourcing hurdles, business and financial risks, and other roadblocks to building sustained excellence – challenges that hobble many in-house agencies and keep others from living up to their full promise and potential.
Ultimately, the report defines a proven framework – the “hybrid services model” – for effectively orchestrating marketing activities among a company’s outside agencies, in-house staff, and an in-house agency partner like Filter.
This latter party – a relatively new breed of professional services firm that builds and runs in-house agencies or embedded teams on behalf of its clients – combines the capabilities of a strategic consultancy and the expert marketing chops of an agency, along with strengths in workforce operations and talent development. Through this unique blend of disciplines, in-house agency partners have proved to play a key role in the success and sustainability of in-housing programs among mid-size and large enterprise companies.
“CMOs that invest in their in-house digital marketing capabilities and business model will benefit from a valuable in-house partner to collaborate with external creative and media agency partners. This provides both in-house and external agencies a role. The best work and highest returns will come from CMOs that blend agencies, not break them.”
– Jay Pattisall, Principal Analyst, on his Forrester blog¹
It’s a critical value-add, as more and more companies continue to explore in-housing as a means to elevate and accelerate their marketing performance. In a recent survey by the Association of National Advertisers, 78 percent of companies reported new development of some kind of internal marketing organization, and 70 percent moved at least some established business in-house over the past three years.²
The hybrid services model helps brands achieve more with less because they benefit from external agencies and in-house agencies adopting a partnership mentality. Notes Forrester, “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.”³ CMOs that identify the strengths of all their partners and carve out specific remits for strategy and execution responsibilities ensure that they replace competition with coordination.
Yes, a hybrid approach requires clients to rethink innovation, accountability, and how they work with agencies. It also requires rethinking how to build and sustain digital expertise and creative cultures inside the client organization.
But the alternative to such measures can be dire. Delivering true business transformation is difficult for companies, and data show that most will fail. Others will be hamstrung by missed revenue targets, brand misfires, ineffective customer experiences, and unhappy employees.
For these and many other reasons, now may be the perfect time for CMOs to rethink the future of their digital marketing model, internally and externally.
This new E-book is a good place to start. To read and learn more, download it here.
- “Rethink The In-House Agency Hype.” Nov 13, 2018
- “Twelve Top Takeaways from ANA In-House Agency Report,” ANA, October 2018
- “Unleash The Potential Of In-House Agencies,” Forrester Research, November 2018
