Finding the best way to balance a strong in-house team with agency support is front of mind for most marketing leaders. And while the exact answer differs for every business, there are common themes that can help find the right solution.
Speaking at Campaign’s In-Housing Summit on 18th October 2022, George Porteous, chief strategy officer at AAR Group, said: “Whatever the model, you create great work by having a team of people focussed on the right challenge.”
He said the main reason for outsourcing is the need for freshness and innovation, and the desire to bring specific capabilities to a marketing operation: ‘Clients tell us that external agencies sometimes have the edge on objectivity and can bring the challenges that move the brand on. For in-house teams, over a long period, how do they stay fresh?’
However it’s also important to ensure in-house teams aren’t left with the business as usual work, while agencies take what’s seen as the exciting creative work.
So the role of the chief marketing officer is to conduct the orchestra. Angela Porter, CMO at ProCook, said: “I was challenged by head of creative because I had got my internal team to do the day-to-day, so thought things would fall down if I gave the big creative work to them. The easy option was to give it to an external agency, but actually, the right option was to find resource to cover the day-to-day and give the internal team the opportunity to do the big creative work.”
Now, she said, the business has a pool of four or five freelancers who know the business and can step in and help when the in-house team works on big creative projects. For Porter, balancing in-house versus external often depends on the task at hand, with external support often best used to spike expertise in areas that aren’t required every day.
“I wouldn’t want a legendary strategist working on my team day-to-day because it’s not needed. They would get bored. When you need that refresh, your day-to-day teams are often too embedded in the business to see the woods for the trees, and you need that freshness in thinking.”
Developing that freshness of thinking across an in-house team has become a strategic goal for some companies. Dries Mertens is head of media, sponsorships, experiential marketing and in-house agency (draftLine) at AB InBev Europe, a brewery housing brands such as Becks and Budweiser. He said much work has been done to make the in-house creative team feel ownership over creative work.
“Once you make creative team realise that their legacy is building a brand… once people get that feeling, they feel so much opportunity and are so engaged. The work is better.” He added that long-term external partners often help support, but the information that internal teams are exposed to can give them the edge on creating great work quickly.
Porter added, however, that getting the mix right is again important – for some tasks, agencies are quicker because they’re “doing something they’ve done for ten other clients over the last 12 months.”
AB InBev has a content framework that requires both broad, inspirational ideas as well as more personal, useful content. “For inspirational, broad content we have very good agency partners. But we know that’s not all that matters,” Mertens said.
During Covid lockdowns, for instance, the internal team quickly built an app that enabled people stuck at home to buy vouchers for future drinks at their local pubs, which helped bring closed pubs cashflow. He said an agency would not have been able to do that work quickly enough. “By the time you briefed that to the agency, and got them to talk to the sales team, it would have taken too much time.”
When it comes to working together, he added the key is to get internal teams ownership over agency relationships, meaning they feel supported instead of undermined. Shared KPIs also help achieve this, and Porter added it’s important to give internal staff feedback that is just as detailed – and picks up on positives – as agencies.
Finally, as Porteous says, having the right environment is crucial. “You can’t expect creative people to perform well if they are not in a vibrant environment. Getting that right – as well as having strong leadership - is key for better performance, which impacts on recruitment and retention, which improves the quality of the work.”