A recipe for harmony, collaboration and best practice

How the rise of client in-housing can work best for agency and client alike

Recent years have seen increasing numbers of clients bringing their design execution in-house. This can mean anything, from large organisations building their own internal agencies of highly skilled team members, well versed in using industry standard software and overseen by a brand manager, to lone marketing managers using subscription software like Canva to produce their brand’s day-to-day marketing and comms. And it’s a trend that’s not going away any time soon.

A growing trend

Typically, the trend to build in-house resources goes in waves, driven by the state of the economy. When budgets are tight – resources, quite unsurprisingly, are brought in-house. As the economy bounces back, external agencies come back into play. But nowadays, with drag-and-drop online software and AI tools, that move in-house looks set to stick.

You could call it the democratisation of design. So much more can now be achieved with far less; for example, you don’t necessarily need knowledge around, say, typography or layout principles, something that used to be the sole preserve of designers, in order to create serviceable social media content templates.

Creative in-housing trend

Democracy is good, right?

As much as it creates opportunities, this sort of democracy also brings with it a number of challenges for both client and external agency. Needless to say, the quality of experiences and outputs will vary depending on an organisation’s attitude, structure, expertise and culture. To generalise…

Opportunities [on the client-side]:

Flexibility and immediate access to resources.

Insider-advantage – knowledge of the sector and competition as well as the internal machinations of the organisation.

Lower costs

Challenges

Overwhelm – too much work for too little resource. In-house teams are likely to be pulled in a number of different directions, carrying responsibility for skill sets other than design (such as marketing and copywriting).

Less authority – sadly, it’s a fact that an external specialist often garners more respect with senior leadership than a more junior internal team member.

Limited perspective – in-house teams, by their very nature and insider status, struggle with being able to effectively step back and see the wood for the trees.

Less expertise – external agencies tend to laser focus on their specialisms which means they have the advantage of staying up to speed with the latest innovations and trends in their particular area.

What an outsider brings to the table

The challenges listed above (by no means an exhaustive list) should confirm that in developing an in-house resource you should never close the door on bringing in outsiders, i.e. external agencies and specialists. An external perspective can complement and enhance in-house capabilities, meaning you’ll benefit from:

Experience of selling change in – specialists, in particular senior specialists, are experienced in providing evidence for change, articulating and defending a rationale, and responding to objections.

An objective viewpoint – an internal brand or marketing manager may have a hypothesis or gut feeling but will not have the time, nor access to the methods and tools, to test that theory in a truly objective manner.

A wider lens perspective – external advisers will have encountered similar patterns and trends from working on comparable client challenges. They can apply these experiences alongside their facility for having that ‘big picture’ whole-of-market view.

In short, they leverage their specialist expertise for strategic impact.

When is the best time to seek specialist help?

The obvious time to bring in specialists is to bridge skills gaps or to inject a creative spark into brand campaigns, rebrands and refreshes. But time is of the essence. If there’s change afoot – if you’re looking to evolve your positioning or fully reposition your brand – don’t get too far into the process before calling those specialists in.

I’d argue that the best time to bring external help in is when you have an unscientific hunch that things aren’t working. The outsider can propose the best method to objectively test your hypothesis – introducing rigorous research methods, moving away from those knee-jerk, solely emotional responses and casting a wider lens over the entire project. It’s one action that will, in the long run, save you time, money and unproductive brand soul-searching.

The importance of building ongoing relationships

For your brand to thrive and prosper, your facility for accessing external specialists shouldn’t be limited to crisis or special case scenarios. Building ongoing relationships means that both sides will be able to get the most out of their connection and the client will benefit from being able to address issues before they become problems.

That external perspective can be invaluable, for instance, when you find your brand going a little off-piste. This can sometimes be down to the people on your team changing. Having an external brand champion to call on means you’ll be able to right things by running a refresher on the whys and wherefores of your brand strategy, ensuring that the concept and thinking behind the brand doesn’t ‘leave the room’ when your staff move on.

 

Sue onboarding team – Brand Champion

You might also consider using an agency or individual to provide ongoing creative direction or mentoring. This approach will help you develop your skills, adding to your in-house capabilities, and ensuring you’re on the case, retaining and building that all-important brand salience (i.e. knowing when to pull in the reins when there’s an appetite to gallop off in a new direction!).

Embracing an open and collaborative mindset

From an agency perspective, the tide of in-housing creative and design resources isn’t going out again any time soon. In fact, according to the 2024 DBA report What Clients Think, 22% of clients without an in-house creative resource stated that their company was currently considering developing this capacity.

Nervous agencies can, and should, embrace this change because, on the other side of the coin, a whopping 80% of clients with in-house creative resources would like to see a greater level of collaboration with external agencies.

This should be music to agency ears. Designers, even when they have completed and signed off a project, care and carry on caring how the brand identity they’ve created, will fare ‘in the wild’. They’re seldom happy to just walk away from the project launch fanfare with some smart visuals and a case study for their own website. Call it control freakery, but what they fear most when they complete a rebrand or brand refresh and pass the brand assets over to the client’s in-house team to manage, is that their concept, the Big Idea will be diluted or damaged through poor execution.

And this, of course, is a valid concern but, it doesn’t have to be this way. In-house and external resources need to find ways to play to their strengths, create symbiotic loops between them, learn from each other and grow as a result.

The in-house team can share their industry insights and join the creative journey through points of co-creation. External specialists can share their knowledge of trends and skills as well as helping to build the in-house team’s capability and confidence for selling design and strategy into senior leadership and stakeholders.

The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.

Babe Ruth

Conclusion

Further evidence, should it be needed that, despite the rise of the in-house resource, design agencies are still very much valued comes from What Clients Think. Their findings reveal that 95% of clients with an in-house creative resource still see the value in using external agencies for particular challenges, typically for bigger, more strategic projects or where a fresh perspective is particularly called for.

Creative in-housing trend

It seems that we’ve reached a point where it’s not an either/or situation where in-housing and outsourcing come and go in cycles. The most impactful branding will be born from embracing the synergy between in-house and external specialists and ensuring we all become excellent collaborators.

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