In-housing agencies operate in a complex and competitive environment, where people are exposed to brand content through a plethora of channels. While economic pressures on businesses lead to marketing budgets becoming smaller, brands are still trying to hit their growth targets.
At a recent Campaign In-Housing Summit roundtable, hosted by monday.com, experts discussed the challenges that arise from this.
George Graham, senior enterprise account manager at monday.com, stated that when an organisation is looking to increase revenues, creatives are typically asked to do more with less. “To top this off they also need to bring innovation into the market, and this is going to influence the marketing mix for years to come.” he said.
Sebastian Brown, director of creative at Sofology, said a big challenge for his team is producing the volume and variety of content needed around the same product for all of Sofology’s social channels. “We use automation to create different variations of the same product in various environments with different lighting, different art direction, at a much faster pace than we previously did with photography,” he said.
Janet Duckworth, brand director at Sofology, said the business is starting to take more functions, such as influencer marketing, in-house: “We're in a transition period where we’re looking at all the platforms, and how we service them internally.”
Rising demand?
Patrick Burgoyne, co-founder of In-House Agency Leaders’ Club, questioned whether it’s true that customers are demanding more content.
“Looking at the wastage of assets, the sheer amount of stuff that gets made that no one ever sees and that sits on some server somewhere, it feels like there’s this truism that’s been allowed to take hold that customers are demanding more,” he said. “But really it's about the system being set up to demand more.”
To reduce wastage, Siobhan Crowe, global director, content studios at Reckitt, predicted that media and content will sit much closer together in the future. “How do we get enough eyeballs on the content to effectively make the complete ROI, the amount of content and investment that went into that creation, as well as into the media placement?” she said. “That's the untapped area.”
In-house issues
Emma Turner, founder of In-House Agency Review and company director at Dahling, noted that one big challenge for agencies is that they don’t know what assets have already been made. “When you've got a big brand, where the activities and departments aren’t connected, it's easy to ask for an asset again when it's already been created,” she said. “It’s about making sure that the DAM is up to speed and it's all named properly, and everyone knows what we're making.”
Kira Prince, creative excellence lead at The Kitchen at Kraft-Heinz, agreed: “Our DAM is more of a museum.”
Attendees were in agreement that part of the problem is that marketers want to come up with their own ideas rather than reusing someone else’s, but that this mindset needs to shift. Suzanne Partridge, managing director at Sainsbury’s, highlighted the importance of this in retail. “It’s the same every year, there’s no additional insight for Halloween, so why not reuse the same thing?” she said. “There's brand consistency in that as well.”
At Three, the UK agency has recently taken on marketing in Ireland. James Mathers, head of operations at Three Mobile, said it had worked on getting both markets to think about what they needed because it was getting too many briefs. “Is it for commercial growth or is it for an internal whim?” he said. “We now have the standing, because of how established we are, to go back and say, ‘You can't have that’.”
Everyone agreed that a consistent problem with being in-house is that brands believe that they can always get what they want without considering the agency’s resources and workload. However, if a brand wants award-winning creative, the same principles need to apply to in-house agencies as external agencies.
Luis Clark, go-to-market manager, EMEA at monday.com, said making sure that briefs become trackable so that everyone knows what is being created can help with many of these challenges. Lauren Brown, creative lead at Puddle Ducks Franchising, agreed with this. She said the brand had given all of its 36 franchises access to Canva, which had “spiralled”. “It’s good to get those unique briefs in because it does push things forward,” she continued. “If we just gave them a template all the time, they'd get bored.”
Ruth Nelson, strategic brand and marketing manager at Puddle Ducks Franchising, added: “They're on the ground, so there is value in what they have to say, but we feel like we've reached the stage where the tail is wagging the dog a bit, and we have to fight with that.”
Internal processes
Other challenges include lack of collaboration and ineffective communication as well as departmental silos within companies.
Lee Barnsley, global design officer at Reckitt, said large organisations with many brands grapple with this: “Various regions have more focus on various brands, and we’ve found that if you don't give them the right content to activate in their market, they'll go off and create themselves. It's a double-edged sword because we've developed and spent lots of money on these lovely toolkits, and then everyone ignores them.”
Specsavers Creative has gone through a period of transformation, according to head of creative Julia Arenson. The brand has implemented a new workflow system in the UK, which is now being launched in all of its regions. “Having a common language is really important, and going globally and being regional is important as well,” she said. “You've got to make sure the markets can adapt whatever we're doing to fit their needs.”
In-house agencies also need to know when to hire freelancers. Helen Jones, creative director at Shelter UK, said the charity had looked at where the in-house team added value and found that for small jobs it was cheaper to go to a freelancer. “If you go in-house you're getting a whole team whether you want it or not, whereas with a freelancer, it's just one person,” she said. “We bring the most value to the more strategic projects.”